THE warning light has come on. Airline passengers should fasten their seatbelts: there is a bumpy ride ahead. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic have suggested that the disruption which has hit British Airways' flights to Washington and Riyadh in the last few days could be with us for a long time to come. "Very specific intelligence" is said to lie behind the decision to call off a succession of BA flights to Washington. "Where we have to cancel a flight, the grounds are very clear in out minds," declared the transport secretary Alistair Darling. But what intelligence? By its very nature, a lot of this work is secret. "People should have faith in the authorities, the airlines and all of us," Tony Blair said yesterday. He's probably right, and those whose travel plans were thrown into chaos last week certainly seemed to accept that their inconvenience was a price that was going to have to be paid. The collective public at large, though, is a fickle beast. If we manage to survive the next few days without an air terrorist incident, and if those days stretch out into weeks and months, then inevitably people will lower their guards. Pleas of "trust me, I'm a politician" will be greeted with increasing cynicism. Justifiably so, many would say, as they wait in apparent vain for signs of the weapons of mass destruction the politicians promised us would be found in Iraq. And then, just as we have been lulled into a sense of security, something terrible happens - and the blame game goes into overdrive. Against this background, it comes almost as a relief that the holiday plane crash in the Red Sea is starting to look like a "normal" accident, although that will be no comfort at all to the families of those who died at Sharm el-Sheik. Horror stories are already starting to emerge about the operating standards of the airline involved, but so far there seems to be little hint of possible terrorism. It is a timely reminder that the biggest threat to air safety is, and always has been, human failing in one form or another. | 
