Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-14-Speech-3-339"
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"en.20060614.20.3-339"2
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".
Mr President, whilst congratulating Mr Costa on his excellent report, I wish to bring to the attention of this House four areas of concern in relation to civil aviation security which, in my view, are not adequately dealt with by either the existing or the proposed legislation.
The first relates to the non-inclusion in the proposal under consideration of improvements in the measures to prevent unauthorised access to the flight crew compartment. Such measures are currently covered only by ICAO provisions. These provisions are, unfortunately, outdated and need revision based on experience. Such experience is provided, for example, by the tragic crash of the Helios airline jet in Greece last summer in which 121 people died. On that occasion, the two pilots lost consciousness as a result of ensuing hypoxia and a steward, who was a qualified pilot himself, could not enter the cockpit in time to prevent a crash because of the currently-applied security locking system of the cockpit door.
The second area of concern relates to the attempt to broaden the definition of a ‘potentially disruptive passenger’ to include people whose behaviour is potentially a source of dangerous disruption. This is welcomed, but unfortunately the most common type of disruptive passenger – the drunk passenger – is not dealt with here. Furthermore, there is no attempt to prevent such situations: alcohol continues to be served in plentiful quantities and, on many flights, free of charge to passengers. The most logical thing to do would be to ban alcohol use on flights.
The third area of concern has to do with the security screening for potential weapons. Passengers are forbidden to carry objects which, only with the greatest stretch of the imagination, could possibly be considered to be of any offensive capability, such as nail clippers; yet glass bottles of alcoholic beverages, for example, are allowed on board. I need not point out that a broken bottle held by the bottle neck is a most dangerous weapon in the hands of an assailant. The wise approach would be not to allow glass bottles in the passenger cabin.
The fourth area of concern is the controversial issue of flight marshals. The general approach of the legislators is that no weapon-carrying security officers should be present on aircraft. The main argument put forward in favour of this position is the alleged catastrophic risk of a weapon firing accidentally during flight. This is not accurate. Certain states such as Israel have for many years now had armed personnel on their national airline’s flights, and I am not aware of any such accidents occurring to date. In fact, modern weapons such as double action pistols with built-in advanced safety mechanisms cannot fire accidentally, but even if they did this is very unlikely to cause a crash. Indeed, there have been numerous occasions where firearms were used on board aircraft, and yet this in itself did not severely affect flight capability. On the other hand, the presence of air marshals could be crucial in neutralising a hijack situation and certainly could act as a strong deterrent in preventing one from arising in the first place."@en1
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