Trust dogs over air marshals, inquiry hears

Ottawa: Trust dogs, not guns, to make air travel safer, a leading international aviation-security expert told the Air India commission of inquiry yesterday.
In fact, Rodney Wallis, a civil aviation consultant from Britain, said armed sky marshals are more of a menace than they are a security feature.
"There is no place for a weapon of any sort in the cabin of an airplane," said Wallis, author of Combating Air Terrorism (1993), Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons (2001) and How Safe are our Skies? (2003).
"It increases the risk (that things will go wrong) and my goal is the minimize the risk. That's what security is all about," he said. "Dogs, with a good dog handler, certainly have a role to play in aviation security."
The inquiry into the June 23, 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, in which 329 people died off the coast of Ireland, is in the midst of its aviation-security phase, which is looking at the various protective measures employed by nations and airlines around the world.
Not only do trained dogs have the ability to sniff out suspicious luggage, Wallis said, they also act as a visible deterrent.
In Canada, bomb-sniffing dogs are usually only called in when a suspicious piece of luggage is discovered by routine X-ray. Flight 182 was brought down by a bomb hidden in an unaccompanied suitcase put on a Canadian Pacific airline flight in Vancouver and later transferred to the Air India flight in Toronto.
05/06/07 Richard Brennan/Toronto Star

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Air India Jun 2007, Foreign Jun 2007, Safety Jun 2007