I’m writing this on quite an astoundingly high tech plane
Original article date: October 1997
I’m writing this on a plane. Quite an astoundingly high tech plane, I might add. I have a screen on the seat-back in front of me with a control pendant that allows me to browse pages of news/sport, play a version of Tetris meets Mario, and make a phone call from my seat.
More importantly, they’ve just brought me my second beer. Things have really come on since I last flew!
So I’m in grave danger of forgetting how unimpressed I was an hour ago when we boarded. We’d got over the airport renovations that caused a mile walk through several car parks, the airline computer crashing just as we were about to board, and the coach company who were supposed to get us to Heathrow announcing that the bus was full and they had laid on a relief service which would (inexplicably) miss Heathrow off the route. But these were minor hiccups.
The big one was security. We entered the airport carrying hand luggage and hold luggage. They took the latter from us, passed it through an X-ray machine, and gave it back, with a plastic band wrapped round it. This token gesture meant that we officially couldn’t reopen it. In fact had I been carrying a bomb (and not been stupid enough to volunteer to have it X-rayed) I would now transfer it to the hold luggage via one of the many bag apertures that the daft plastic band failed to seal, before joining a queue to check in.
What’s more, so chaotic was the system, I could have quite easily transferred the bomb to the hold luggage of a different person entirely as they meandered past the X-ray machine to the exit conveyor. Being well behaved, they wouldn’t re-open the luggage and find it, because of the band around it. Of course I wouldn’t even check in then. Which makes you wonder what the whole system was there for. A random X-ray sample later on (not 100%) would now be the only thing that might prevent a catastrophe.
Now, if you’ve ever worked on a pharmaceutical machine or product that needed to be submitted to a regulatory body such as the FDA or MCA, you’ll know the sort of burden of proof that rests on you. You say “This machine produces and inspects this product and can’t incorrectly pass a bad one”, and they say “How do you know?” and you explain that there are inspection sensors, and they ask how you know they work, and you show them test data, and they ask how you know the machine is wired right and you show them signed off build and test records, and they ask how you know the software functions correctly and you show them evidence of a structured software design approach and of a well planned test program and a signed set of test records.
And they keep on asking “How do you know?” until no doubt remains. This way they can be confident that there isn’t some daft error letting dangerously non-conforming stuff out into the world. And you grudgingly accept that all this is necessary if the world is to be a safe place to buy a tablet or syringe or whatever.
Much the same sort of quality systems approach applies to aircraft build and maintenance. There’s a fair number of checks to prevent a plane taking to the skies with a few nuts and bolts missing. There has to be.
So let’s come back to ‘how do you know there’s no bomb on this plane?’. If the CAA were as stringent about security as they are about aircraft maintenance, the security process we went through would be laughed out of court! But presumably there is somebody who ‘validates’ a security process? Or maybe the authorities figure that the airlines don’t want a bomb any more than the passengers do, so if the airlines seem happy with their procedures, they’re probably OK. But with typical cost pressures these days, that must surely be indefensible!
Ah well. You’ve got to go sometime. Let’s just hope it’s on the return flight. It’d be such a waste to get blown up before the holiday.
October 1997