Customer Reviews

Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism: Winning the War Against Hijackers (Aerospace Management & Law)

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Peter St. John has written the definitive book on air piracy and airport security. I have perused some 20 books and papers dealing with the challenge of keeping hundreds of millions of airline travelers safe. St. John's book is the best. It is at once a text and a page-turner, easily the most comprehensive, analytical, and readable study of a subject that should fascinate anyone who flies.

Where other authors struggle to arrange their material in some coherent manner, St. John's book has a chronology and organization that keeps the reader on track. Too many scholarly authors write pedantic (read: dull) prose; St. John delivers excellent expository writing. While most authors focus on one or selected aspects of this complex international problem, St. John manages, in seven chapters and just 190 pages of text, to examine 60 years of aerial hijacking and sabotage. Yet St. John's book is anything but a historical overview; he scrutinizes past and present situations to develop his prescriptions for improved airport and in-flight security. And although he presents copious detail, his concise, varied syntax reads more like a novel than non-fiction. Hoping to skim some sections, I found this impossible: each chapter captured my concentration, every segment proved integral to the whole.

An Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba, St. John pulls no punches, unhesitatingly criticizing his own government:

"Even after 331 people died on one June day in 1985 as a result of air terrorism in Canada, the government scarcely changed its policy of studied neglect of the airports of Canada."

"The central problem in both U.S. and Canadian airports is that the security personnel are completely inadequate...."

"But in North America at present, more attention is paid to illegal parking of cars...than to security."

In compiling this seminal textbook (for airlines and their passengers, for agencies and governments) on air terrorism, St. John invokes and duly credits more than 100 sources. However, he states his own specific and cogent conclusions as to what must be done, on the ground and in the air, to combat terrorism.

"Good airport security involves a delicate balance of human and technological expertise in which the human element takes the lead...it involves close cooperation between all agencies that can, together, block all security loopholes that exist...."

"The main problem ...has to do with chinks in the armor, the loopholes that are still far too plentiful in a Western commercial aviation system more finely tuned to profitability than to security."

Most of the loopholes St. John identifies relate to inadequacies not of machines, but of humans. His message is clear: excellent security is a function of not of resources, but of resolve. In terms of resolve, he cites Israel as the benchmark:

"No attempted hijacking of an El Al airliner has been attempted since 1970, and that one failed...."

St. John augments his study with ten appendices found nowhere else in the literature. These include chronological listings of aircraft sabotage (1949-1988) and of important aircraft hijacks (1968-1989), as well as diagrams of the "terror-proof" airports he deems crucial to controlling hijacking. Two non-statistical appendices, however, stand out as the most intriguing. The first is "Terrorism from Below and Above," which summarizes human aspects of terrorism through profiles of both terrorists and their victims. The other is "My People Shall Live," Leila Khaled's autobiographical account of the two hijackings she led. Khaled survived capture and temporary imprisonment to live on as the grande dame of the Palestinian Intifada.

St. John's book is fully annotated and well indexed. If you can own but one book on terrorism in the air, choose this one.