Previous RyanAir rants here, here and here.Written Saturday, between Skavsta and Brussels:
Everytime I pass through Skavsta Airport, it has doubled in size. With RyanAir‘s help, it now needs to accomodate many more passengers, and the result is a modest and pleasant work in progress, made from sober prefab hangars furnished with pine-wood furniture. It does the job of budget airport admirably.
Today, however, my progress through it happened far too efficiently. Unlike on previous occasions I’ve flown from Skavsta, neither RyanAir nor Swedish customs have any clue who is onboard the plane I am flying on now. I don’t know if this is a new and approved policy, but it amounts to a stunning security risk. I have just spent 20 minutes thinking up ways of exploiting it, and came up with two scenarios all by myself. And I’m very unimaginative when it comes to terrorism.
But first, here is how the boarding process worked today: I arrived at the check-in counter and gave the RyanAir employee my Belgian identity card, a reservation number and a piece of luggage. In return, I was handed a “boarding pass” — a laminated card with a sequential number on it, presumably with my name correlated to the number in her records — and a luggage ticket.
The security check involved showing the laminated card to a guard, placing the usual items in the x-ray machine, and pacing through the metal detector. Then, when it was time to board, I handed the card to a RyanAir employee and walked to the plane.
What’s wrong with this picture? First, there was no customs check, unlike on previous occasions. Swedish customs officials thus have no idea if anyone on this plane is on Interpol’s most-wanted list, perhaps travelling on a forged ID. Second, RyanAir has no clue if its passenger manifest is accurate: At boarding time, RyanAir personnel did not ask for my identity card to correlate it with the name I assume is attached to the number on my boarding pass.
This means, in effect, that after checking in, I could have given that laminated card to anyone, and that person could now be on the plane instead of me. Can you imagine this happening in the US? Does it take a local 9/11 to make Sweden take terrorism seriously? Could it be, I shudder to think, that there was no customs check today because it is the Easter holiday?
How to exploit this? Scenario number 1: Take some members of a terrorist group known to Interpol, have them travel to the airport with an equal number of new recruits with unblemished records, get the recruits to check in without a fuss, hand the boarding passes to the professionals, let them wear a discrete amount of semtex explosives on their person as they walk through the x-ray machine, and perhaps one of the new breed of porcelain guns. Stand at the front of the line for boarding, so you get the front-row seats nearest the cockpit. When you get near the nuclear reactors 30km north of Copenhagen, capital of a US ally in the war in Iraq, blow open the cockpit door, kill the pilots, and aim for the cooling towers. They’re easy to spot on a beautiful day like today on the Skavsta-Brussels route.
Scenario number 2: A variation on a theme that has already had proven results. Terrorist boyfriend with naive girlfriend and her baby plan a holiday. The kid gets to sit on the mother’s lap, just barely, so they only need two boarding passes. At the last minute, the boyfriend “forgets” something essential back home, but don’t worry, tickets are so cheap he will follow her and their luggage on the next flight. Since RyanAir tickets are not refundable, might as well use the second boarding pass for an extra seat for the baby; the flights are always full these days, and they don’t check the identity of passengers anyways. Boyfriend goes home, girlfriend blows up somewhere over Europe.
Am I exaggerating? Are these merely the rantings of somebody who had balcony views of 9/11? Could this never happen in Europe? Other European airports employ customs officials. Other airlines print names on boarding passes. Somebody here is saving money at the expense of security.
Written today, Between Brussels and Dublin:
Contrast the above with the state of affairs in Brussels: RyanAir gives me a printed, numbered boarding pass with my name written on it by the check-in attendant. A customs officer peers suspiciously at both my national ID card and boarding pass before I am let into the departure lounge. And when it is time to board, a RyanAir employee actively seeks out and compares the name on the boarding card with my ID card before I am allowed on the tarmac — no token efforts here. This is what I am used to. Skavsta is a security disaster waiting to happen.
Actually there are no cooling towers on any Swedish nuclear plant, they’re all cooled by sea water (~60% of the heat down the drain). I guess the terrorists would aim for the reactor encapsulation anyway.
Couldn’t the terrorists save lots of time and effort just using the newbies to blow up the plane? It’s not like there are a load of successful, experienced, suicide bombers out there.
And how do you know that Ryanair’s computers aren’t linked to the immigration computer? And when was the last time you went through an immigration (not customs, you never go through customs anywhere) check on the way out of the US? *Sometimes* they check at the gate, lots of the time they don’t. And Ryanair has borrowed this laminated boarding card technique from bucket airlines in the US.
If they can get porcelain guns and semtex on the plane, we’re in trouble whatever. Which is why it was good you had to go through the security screening and lets hope it works. The rest of what you say seems to me to be rantings indeed.
oh, is good idea! air tickest are expensive now these days. ryanair most cheaply tickets, thanking you muchly. i hit guys in cell upsiude head when reading this, they no bloody good, not big brains but good boys.”why you not have ideas like this stupids” i say to them. “littzle man with blog, he much better terrorists than you guys”. which fretilizer brand you like? don’t buying baby bio, no bloody good. thank thank you infidel crusader dog-pig.
Amazing. I could have sworn this was Eurof, what with the odd-Indian sounding intonation. But the IP address seems to be from Lithuania, which is doubly amazing. Who knew Balticians had a sense of humor?
Charles: Customs, immigration, same thing (you know what I mean, obviously); the point is that those who say they are travelling are not the ones who necessarily end up travelling. This is impossible in the US, and only after 9/11. Why make it easy? Even if yoo are a cynical Swedish government official (if that exists), why expose yourself to the kind of opportunity for criticism Bush faces? In the US, domestic flights require checks of visual IDs with ticket purchases, and as you and I know, the FBI checks every passenger manifest.
Given that all of the 9/11 terrorists were (1) foreign and (2) already in the US, presumably they’d gone through immigration, suggesting that the records on them weren’t solid enough to stop them (or their aliasis) boarding a plane. And not all flights in the US now double-check ID at the departure gate, so you can be a different person and get on the plane.
What stops planes being blown up is stopping stuff that could blow them up getting on the plane in the first place. What stops 9/11 is strengthened cockpit doors and new rules about what to do in the event of hijacking.
But is the coffee good?
Oh I give up. Today in Dublin I could have done the same trick as in Skavsta. But at Glasgow Prestwick, although there was no govt. passport check for the flight to Sweden, RyanAir did write my name on the boarding pass and then and then ask for ID to verify it was me flying at the gate. I see no rhyme nor reason in the proceedings.
Ryanair does the same in Malmö as in Skavsta.