The Stuff That Goes Air Cargo

When I used to work for the airlines, I was consistently amazed at the stuff that was sent via air cargo. Magazines, oranges, penguins, tigers, computer parts, live crabs, dead people, pills in 55 gallon drums, and I'm quite sure that there was stuff that wasn't supposed to be in there also. I'm guessing that for every hazmat tag we saw, there were probably 2 that we didn't and the occasional box that shouldn't have been on there at all. And with the folks at the air cargo facility allowing people to "build" their own containers and pallets I'm really not too surprised that two tons of machine guns were found in the holds after a Czech Airlines flight to New York diverted to Iceland.

Two tons on a 767 is really not much. If it's a stretch '67, that would be about 2 out of the 30 container positions in the belly. International flights in particular carry a very odd assortment of freight, so two containers manifested as "machine parts" wouldn't arouse too much suspicion. So long as they're tarriffed at a reasonable level, whoever was sending these had a pretty good chance of sneaking them through Customs, unopened and uninspected. I'm guessing that the only reason we found these weapons is because some nutjob decided to email in the bomb threat after figuring out that Air Force One and the Czech airplane were going to be in the same area at about the same time. Had that not happened, we'd have another couple of container loads of machine guns on the streets.

The shippers in this case were shipping the items air cargo because they knew that they had a more than reasonable chance of getting the weapons through the system unimpeded. This is pointing to a failure in the system. We need to, as a nation, figure out someway to better secure ourselves. What's the answer? I don't know, maybe some kind of a prescreening done by a computer using shape matching or some such technology. What I do know is that the system as it currently exists is broken and there don't seem to be too many suggestions on how to fix it, except for to hire more customs agents (and to further bloat the bureaucracy).

Two tons of machine guns is just the tip of the iceberg.

Hat tip: On The Third Hand, where Kathy is right to question why the mainstream media isn't reporting this. This is a matter of national security - even if the airline involved by from the Czech Republic.