Passengers are queuing for the detector gates shoes in hand. They are scanned by body scanners and interrogated exhaustively about their private life. If found suspicious, they are put on a blacklist, without even knowing it. Whoever ends up on such a list - and this also holds for Belgian passengers - will experience considerable difficulties when wanting to travel by plane again in the future.
And that is not all. Flights from American airlines flying to Belgium often carry armed air marshalls who will shoot to kill in case of conflict. The molehill has been made into a mountain. The author's undercover investigations and thorough research show that those safety measures are sometimes applied in very creative ways. Has air travel really become safer?
Denise Van Den Broeck is a freelance journalist. In 2008 she went undercover as a security guard in an organisation that works in the security zone of Brussels Airport. Her job was to track down terrorists, bombs and drugs.
