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Americans, painfully emerging from a state of denial about the threat of terrorism, have been reluctant to acknowledge that we may be forced to make some trade-offs, forgoing quick, carefree airport experiences in return for improved odds in the sky. The Israelis require coach flyers to arrive at the airport three hours before takeoff, while business-class ticket holders must arrive two hours early. "Will the American public be willing to sit there for hours and hours just waiting?" wonders Louis J. Rodrigues, who led the gao inquiry. "We have to agree, as a country, that the threat is significant enough to warrant that kind of inconvenience."
And the Federal Government, the airlines and the passengers may all have to agree that the extra costs just have to be borne. "The fundamental problem is, we have reduced aviation security to a commercial question," says Morris D. Busby, formerly the State Department's top official on counterterrorism. "For the airline CEO, security becomes something that must be done as cheaply and effectively as possible."
The threat of terrorism can never be entirely erased. Tightening airport security is like squeezing one end of a balloon: if airlines become too difficult a target, terrorists will point their weapons at a bulge elsewhere. "There is always," says international terrorism expert Victor LeVine, a professor at Washington University, "some window of opportunity." Whether an act of terrorism brought down TWA Flight 800 or not, some of those windows could be closed before tragedy can strike again.
--Reported by William Dowell/New York, James L. Graff/Chicago and Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington