Aviation Security Keeping passengers safe on their flights involves more than just making sure the aircraft in use is fully functional and operationally fit. Aviation security involves keeping dangerous people from becoming passengers, and that entails security checks during the boarding process, and more. This paper points to the steps that government officials and airline management must take to ensure the safety and security of private and commercial air travel.

National Strategy for Aviation Security

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created following the attacks on the United States (the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit with hijacked commercial airliners, due to flaws in security checkpoints), has ultimate responsibility for aviation security and safety in America. The DHS published a document entitled "The National Strategy for Aviation Security" in 2007, and within that document readers find the basic theories and strategies for keeping the airways safe and keeping passengers secure from the time they take off until they have de-boarded their flights. The publication asserts that aviation security can be best achieved by "…integrating public and private aviation security global activities" into a "coordinated effort to detect, deter, prevent, and defeat threats to the Air Domain" (DHS, p. 2).

Also, achieving security entails reducing "vulnerabilities" -- such as existed when the Islamic terrorists got plastic knives through security -- and also in entails minimizing the "consequences of, and expediting the recovery from, attacks...

So, what strategies do DHS officials suggest that can achieve aviation security?
The authors of the publication assert that some of the measures already taken include: a) a federalized Transportation Security Officer workforce that "…screens passengers and baggage traveling on passenger aircraft"; b) "hardened doors to prevent unauthorized access to the flight deck"; c) air marshals on the federal payroll that fly "anonymously on commercial passenger aircraft" providing an armed law enforcement presence on some flights; d) "enhanced explosives and threat detection technology" that has been established in "hundreds of airports"; e) newly developed air traffic management security measures; and f) a "cadre of canine explosives detection teams screen baggage, cargo, and increasingly, carry-on items" (DHS, 6).

Understanding the threats to aviation safety is an important first step -- beyond making sure passengers are thoroughly checked before boarding -- and the DHS describes the threats as threefold: terrorist groups; hostile nation-states; and "other criminals" (8). Terrorist groups are quite well understood and defined, but what nation-states are hostile and potentially capable of attacking aviation?

The DHS explains that some nation-states "provide training, funding, supplies…and operational direction to surrogates" that have terrorism on their agenda. Other nation-states "knowingly or unknowingly provide safe havens for terrorists" who are planning to attack the U.S. through aviation (9). In other cases terrorists can exploit some…