What are you willing to give up to make air travel safer? An additional $50 a ticket? $200? An extra half-hour spent undergoing security checks at the airport, or twice that? More important still, how many of us--complacent in the knowledge of American technological superiority, shielded here from foreign terrorism for decades--even realize how perilous the state of airport and airplane security is? For years safety measures, many of which are now standard elsewhere in the world, have languished here--victims of cost-benefit analysis, competing business interests and glacial government bureaucracy.
The modern era of air terrorism--and antiterrorist technology--began on Dec. 21,...