Passenger jets may carry armed guards

Armed guards could be deployed on high-risk flights as part of a new era in aircraft security heralded by the US suicide hijackings, British ministers said yesterday. Doors to the flight deck may also be locked to stop suicide hijackers reaching the crew, a security measure already in place on El Al jets.

"It's a measure we will have to consider in the light of what happened on Tuesday," Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said after a European transport council agreed tighter security for all European flights. Ministers at the meeting in Brussels agreed to raise security measures to levels already deployed in Britain. Security will be increased at European airports.

Tougher measures will be put to an international conference in Montreal in 10 days. The European ministers decided against a ban on passengers taking hand luggage. "What we have to do is have a proportionate response. The worse thing to do would be to deny people the right to travel with their personal possessions," Mr Byers said. "We agreed to look at other measures that will be put in place to deal with people who will kill in an indiscriminate way but will take their own lives as well. That hasn't been the case before."

Following last week's attacks, which exploited lax airline security, the "walk-on" culture of American internal flights is likely to end, and with it the viability of many airlines. Already reeling from new measures that ban knives, knitting needles, corkscrews and even meat thermometers from their cabins, airlines now face new rules to force them to X-ray all baggage on internal flights.

A list of items banned from cabins on British flights has also been released. It includes toy guns, household cutlery, all knives, letter openers, tools, darts, tennis rackets, cricket bats, corkscrews with blades and scissors.

Airlines around the world are in chaos after all commercial flights were grounded inside the US. And stricter security will add hours to check-in times; for US domestic airlines, whose customers are used to checking in their bags at the pavement outside the terminal, that could be disastrous.

Yet the potential to avert the hijacks has been available for years: installing a double set of lockable doors between the passenger cabin and the cockpit would make it impossible for hijackers without powerful guns to gain access. But airlines have declined to install them because of the multimillion-pound cost, and because, in the words of one spokesman, "we prefer for the crew to be able to speak to cabin staff directly if there is an emergency". That ease was the key to the hijackers' attacks: they used attacks on the passengers and crew to lure the pilots from the cockpits, then took over.

Because of that temporary saving, the airlines are now facing an even bigger bill. Even before the tragedies of last Tuesday, the major American airlines were forecast to lose $2.6bn (£1.8bn) this year. But now American passenger traffic may drop as much as 20 per cent by the end of the year, said Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group/Aviation System Research.The world's airlinesare likely to have losses of $10bn this week, the International Air Transport Association said.