Aviation security was not born one morning in September 2001. It found its source in a wave of plane hijackings which hit the world at the end of the 1960s, to the point of imposing, in 1973 in the United States, the compulsory passage under a metal detector.
This Black Tuesday, France closes a section of its sky and triggers the reinforced Vigipirate plan. According to a Senate report on the air transport crisis, the patting of passengers becomes systematic within a few weeks, and hand luggage can be opened upon simple request. At Roissy as at Orly, out of 50,000 badges giving access to reserved areas, nearly 40,000 still belonged to former employees, a loophole to be closed urgently.
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That autumn was born the airport we know. But not quite as we think. The removal of shoes and the restriction of liquids, two gestures that we mechanically associate with September 11, arrived later, thanks to other attacks. Twenty-five years later, untangling them means retracing the construction of the obstacle course of today's air passenger.
A project carried out urgently
And change is first seen in time. Very quickly, the lines grow longer at checkpoints and presenting an identity document becomes systematic even for a simple domestic flight. In the United States, the legislative response arrived in barely two months, with the adoption in November 2001 of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which imposed control by federal agents, the systematic inspection of hold baggage and the reinforcement of cockpit doors.
The crisis is not only security, it is also financial. The total closure of American skies for four days is a blow from which some companies have not recovered, starting with the Belgian Sabena and the Swiss Swissair. The European Union then authorizes its member states to come to the aid of their airlines. Still according to the Senate report, Air France benefits from total compensation of 360 million francs (or a little less than 71 million euros) for the closure of American skies, and 300 million (45 million euros) more for its new security measures, modest aid compared to the... 18 billion dollars released across the Atlantic.
Someone must continue to find this money a quarter of a century later. In France, it is the passenger who finances security for each ticket, via a discreet tax, the T2S. “Airport security is a sovereign mission of the State,” recalls Paul Chiambaretto, director of the Pégase Chair, dedicated to the economics of air transport. For him, this cost remains incompressible, “like a fixed cost per passenger”.
Security that is built in layers
What is happening at the portico is only part of the project. On the other side of the Atlantic, the shift is taking place in stages. In April 2002, Baltimore-Washington became the first airport in the country entirely under federal control, before explosive detection systems were deployed eight months later throughout the network to scan all baggage. At the international level, the International Civil Aviation Organization immediately imposes systematic checks on hold baggage and aligns domestic flights with the requirements of international flights.
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This harmonization does not stop with the texts of the early 2000s. Since then, each new threat has added its own layer of control, sometimes years after the event that motivated it. In December 2001, Richard Reid, a British member of al-Qaeda, attempted to ignite explosives hidden in his shoes on board a Paris-Miami flight. The obligation to remove shoes during checks was only introduced by the American authorities in August 2006, on the basis of information indicating a persistent threat.
That same month, an attempted attack aimed to detonate liquid explosives on board at least ten aircraft linking the United Kingdom to the United States and Canada. The British authorities narrowly foiled the project, and the liquids disappeared from the cabins before a more flexible rule, 100 ml containers in a transparent bag, relaxed it a month later.
The removal of shoes and the limit on liquids therefore emerged in the same month, five years after September 11, in response to the same wave of threats. In France, the WO Group, a specialist in airport services, carries out the inspection and screening of passengers, baggage and freight in a dozen airports in the region. The company summarizes this reflex in one sentence: “any new type of attack is subject to a security countermeasure”.
The same airport, several “customer experiences”
Times are changing. Since 2024, the major project has been called EDS cabin (Explosive Detection Systems for Cabin Baggage), these scanners which allow you to keep liquids and computers in your bag. A real comfort, but such a heavy investment that not all airports are progressing at the same pace. “It’s the diversity of customer experiences that is complicated to follow,” observes Paul Chiambaretto, who describes the same traveler being able, in the same terminal, to pass a light check one day and having to take everything out of his bag the next day, depending on the line in which he falls.
Reducing this control time is not an extra effort. An airport today earns more from its shops and restaurants than from airline fees. “It is crucial so that passengers spend as little time as possible at security, so that they then spend more time in shops and restaurants,” summarizes the economist. WO Group is already boasting the fruits of this race, more than 600 operators certified on these new scanners and a waiting time of less than ten minutes in more than 95% of cases.
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Twenty-five years after the tragedy, the passenger continues to experience the consequences of an event to which he wrongly attributes almost everything that is imposed on him. The control he is undergoing today was not born from a single block on September 11, 2001. It is a pile-up, a layer posed by each new threat, from Richard Reid to London, up to this current race for fluidity which still advances in dispersed order.
