With Al Qaida claiming responsibility for the Christmas Day attack on Flight 253 to Detroit and promising there will be more ("We have prepared men who love to die"), and would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab claiming he will be the first of many, it's no surprise that shares in airlines have taken a hammering. Shares in Delta Airlines, American Airlines parent AMR and UAL Corp, parent of United Airlines all finished lower. This couldn't have come at a worse time for the aviation industry which has lost billions of dollars with the global recession wiping out the once lucrative business travel trade.
But this is just the beginning. Security experts warn that airlines will struggle to stay one step ahead of terrorists. "It's highly like that when security improvements devised as a result of this latest incident have been put in place, terrorists will come up with a way to get round them," Henry Wilkinson of Janusian Security in London told Reuters. The Counterterrorism Blog warns that we might be seeing a new arc of instability opening from Nigeria to Yemen to Somalia. If that's right, it will dwarf anything we have seen coming out of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And airlines, a symbol of western wealth and power, will be vulnerable.
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