This presentation is not designed to replace your own airline's material regarding explosive devices, but rather to supplement your background knowledge of the subject. In doing so, we hope you will gain some appreciation for the immense magnitude of the problems associated with the use of explosive devices by terrorists or others.

The intent of addressing the subject is to impress upon you the need to be intimately familiar with the procedures as time is of the essence in dealing with explosive devices. A crewmember does not know how much time they have before the device detonates, even if there is a visible clock or timer running. The potential for disaster is enormous, on the ground or in the air. Your survival and the survival of all crewmembers, passengers, aircraft and cargo may depend entirely upon your immediate reactions to the threat, which means you may not have time to fumble around looking for your manual or where the procedures are for the circumstance, or even reading them for the first time since basic training. This is not to say that the procedures should be memorized, but that they should be easy to refer to and very familiar in context.

For a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this presentation, airlines have not trained flight crews in what to expect if an explosive device detonates aboard an aircraft, either on the ground or in the air. We believe crewmembers should have some idea of the consequences. If an explosion does occur on an aircraft and the aircraft survives, it is going to create a real mess for you to deal with, both structurally and physically.