[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on CARGO
An area of an airline's operation that can impact on passengers is cargo handling. Wide-bodied aircraft have huge amounts of hold space available for the carriage of commercial goods. Cargo is generally loaded before passengers' baggage, but as they wait to board, air travelers will often see last-minute items being placed in the hold.
Security controls will have been applied to these shipments just as they would have been to passengers' baggage. The very nature of cargo does, of course, require a different approach (Gero, 1997).
Air cargo shipments, like freight at seaports, have always presented a temptation to the less honest employees of companies handling the import and export of goods. Pilferage at docks was at one time endemic. Workers saw theft not as crime but more as a "perk" of the job. With the growth of air cargo, this idea transferred to airports.
On one or two occasions, the theft of bullion shipments and precious stones and currency had lifted the thefts from petty larceny and onto the front pages of the newspapers. In February and March 2002, banknote robberies at London's Heathrow Airport were to do so again. Shipments totalling U.S. $9 million were stolen.
Long before terrorism became a scourge, many airline security departments came into being to fight cargo and baggage crimes.
Former police officers were hired to protect air shipments. The general theft problem appeared to abate, and in those parts of the world given to the illegal export of narcotics, policing began to concentrate on the dangers of putting things into cargo shipments rather than taking items out (Choi, 1994). At the same time, terrorists were changing. They were becoming more threatening, and they were turning to the bomb as an alternative to hijacking as a favored way of attacking civil aviation targets....
