Heightened Airport Insecurity

An airport in West Virginia was evacuated after a woman's glass water bottle and a container of face cleanser tested positive for explosive residue. The FBI later determined that the woman had no explosives.

The next week, a Northwest Airlines flight returned to Amsterdam shortly after takeoff when a U.S. air marshal became suspicious of 12 passengers who passed around cellphones and ignored orders to keep their seat belts on. The 12 were detained but released by Dutch authorities, who also said there was no connection to terrorism.

Then came a series of emergency landings, searches and diverted flights on Aug. 25.

A plane was extensively inspected after screeners at Houston's international airport found a stick of dynamite in a bag that a student bought in South America. The flight continued to Newark -- without the student or his bags -- and was searched again. An Aer Lingus flight from New York to Dublin was evacuated at an airport in western Ireland after a bomb threat was phoned in. And a Continental Airlines flight was diverted to El Paso after the flight crew saw that a lavatory panel was missing. On Monday, a commuter jet was diverted after someone found a threatening note on board the aircraft.

The news media covered all the incidents extensively.

Security experts said that they were not surprised by the diversions or the evacuation of the West Virginia airport and that they expect more such incidents. They blamed television coverage of the coming anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and a surge of inexperienced leisure travelers who might be nervous. They also worry about people who call in fake bomb threats so they can watch the chaos they created on television.

"Everybody is going to be watching television about 9/11 and seeing pictures of the buildings and people jumping from them," said Mike Boyd, a security consultant. "More and more, they're going to be thinking that they're no safer than they were, and that is going to make people jumpy."

Boyd and other security experts blamed the public's anxiety partly on the response to the threat by authorities. Because the passenger screening system is geared toward finding illicit items, not on identifying suspicious people, authorities had no choice but to ban all liquids and gels from passenger cabins, several security experts said.

"We've educated the public to be afraid of things," said Bob Hesselbein, an airline pilot and chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association's national security committee. "Let's hope they never find a way to weave explosives into clothing because it's going to be pretty darned embarrassing on an airplane.. . . We are treating everybody as a potential terrorist, and that breeds more fear."