The spectre of a ticking bomb in the belly of a commercial airliner has returned to haunt the airline industry after world leaders virtually confirmed that is what brought down the Russian airplane in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula last Saturday.
President Obama on Thursday came close to backing British PM David Cameron’s assertion of the bomb theory even as Russia joined Britain in suspending flights from Egypt, particularly from the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Shaikh, which was the departure point for the doomed flight. “I don’t think we know yet,” Obama told the Seattle radio station KIRO in an interview. “Whenever you’ve got a plane crash, first of all you’ve got the tragedy, you-‘ve got making sure there’s an investigation on site. I think there is a possibility that there was a bomb on board. And we are taking that very seriously.”
British intelligence is focusing on the possibility of a compromised airport worker who may have smuggled the bomb into the plane, a theory Egypt is fiercely contesting. With the US too endorsing the British theory, based partly on the heatflash detected by a US infrared satellite that suggested an onboard explosion, now Russia appears to be coming around to the possibility that the flight was destroyed in a terrorist plot.
The incident is certain to leave a mark on the world’s airline industry, which has struggled to provide a sense of security amid constant challenges, including how to balance safety and security with ease of travel. Although onboard bombs are rare in airline history — there have been around 90 cases in airline history, including only a dozen serious, high-casualty ones — it is an ever-present danger. No one knows it better than Air India, which lost a Boeing 747 named Kanishka, with 329 casualties in 1985. Babbar Khalsa operatives blew it up with bombs placed on board as it operated on the MontrealLondon Delhi route.