Runway Lights Stolen; Flights Are Few : Decaying Beirut Airport: Guide Truck Is Hijacked

On a day not long ago, all flights into Beirut International Airport stopped precisely at dusk. Someone had stolen the runway lights.

The airport’s “follow me” truck has been stolen, too. It was hijacked by gunmen as it guided an airliner toward its parking place and was last seen speeding off toward the slums of south Beirut that surround the airfield.

The airport doctor was kidnaped a few blocks from the airport’s main gate not long ago, the day after Shia Muslim leader Nabih Berri gave his personal assurances that airport employees would not be harassed.

More than three months after Shia gunmen hijacked a TWA airliner and forced it to land in Beirut with American hostages, an atmosphere of decay prevails at the shell-pocked Beirut airport. The beleaguered facility seemed to lose its last shred of dignity in August, when nearly every window in the passenger terminal was shattered in two days of fierce shelling.

Sheets of plywood and cardboard boxes cover the jagged holes, like patches on a tenement.

The airport barely manages to handle a dozen flights a day, mostly by Middle East Airlines, the Lebanese national carrier, and occasional flights by Syrian Arab Airlines and Aeroflot, the Soviet airline.

Evoking a memory of happier times, a 1962 travel guide to Lebanon, still available in bookshops, boasts of 99 daily flights into Beirut by more than 35 airlines.

During the last decade of civil war, the vulnerable airport has frequently been closed by shelling, adding to the sense of isolation and danger here. The spirits of the city’s people rise noticeably when the first airliners land or take off after the airport has been closed for a while.

According to airline officials, security has improved at the airport in one important respect since the TWA hijacking. The arrival of plainclothes Syrian security men has resulted in thorough personal searches of departing passengers. This compares with desultory glances that used to constitute the airport’s anti-hijacking effort.

But despite the new toughness, X-ray and metal-detection equipment is still not working.

“Security at the airport has gotten much better,” Khalil Hafez, the assistant airport manager, said. Dressed in boxer shorts and an undershirt, he welcomed a visitor to his office. “Before,” he went on, “there were gunmen everywhere. Now it is completely different.”

True, it is still possible to pass a parcel over the low barrier in the departure area that stands between sightseers and passengers who have cleared customs, as several women did on a recent steamy afternoon.

And one arriving passenger complained about the number of mysterious civilians who rushed out to meet his plane when it arrived last week.

But there no longer seems to be the bedlam of last spring, when gunmen were pulling terrified passengers off planes and checking the passports of arriving passengers before the travelers had even reached the passport control area.

After the Syrian and Lebanese governments agreed to tighten security at the airport in the wake of the TWA hijacking, a half-hearted attempt was made to seal off some access roads and lanes with earthen barriers pushed into place by a bulldozer. But now the barriers have crumbled into low mounds, more of a nuisance than a safeguard.

Dozen Trucks Stolen

In the last two weeks, at least a dozen trucks have been stolen at the airport in broad daylight.

No one has been officially accused of the thefts, but four of the trucks were sheepishly returned to the airport after a complaint was made to Berri, the Shia leader. They were found to have been painted with the colors of Amal, Berri’s militia.

After complaints were made about the number of armed militiamen at the airport, Amal gunmen were removed in July and replaced by members of the Lebanese Internal Security Force. Those men ran away during the August shelling, and, paradoxically, nearly everyone now regrets Amal’s departure.

“You could say there has been something of a security vacuum since Amal left,” Salim Salaam, the Middle East Airlines chairman, told a reporter. “It was better when Amal was here.”

After the TWA hijacking, Salaam’s airline became the target of American sanctions because of lax security at the Beirut airport. The Reagan Administration denied it landing rights in the United States and prohibited the sale of airline tickets to Beirut.

Hard Times for Airline

Middle East Airlines has indeed fallen on hard times since the hijacking, but it seems more of a coincidence than a direct result of the American action.

Salaam, who was wearing glossy cowboy boots and puffing on a Havana cigar, said passenger traffic is down by 58%. The airline is losing about $5,000 a day, he said, adding, “We’re really bleeding in the current situation.”

The pride of the fleet, three Boeing 747s, which used to fly the North American route, have been leased to Egypt Air and British Airways.

The airline used to have 21 other planes, but now only 11 are airworthy. One was burned in the August shelling and three others were damaged.

If security inside the terminal has improved, it has become much worse outside. The kidnaping of Christians has become so rampant that most of the airline’s Christian employees are refusing to report for work. When the doctor, Marcel Prince, was kidnaped, employees came close to calling a protest strike, but he was released after being held for five days.

Short Turnarounds

With more than half the staff staying away, it has been necessary for Middle East Airlines to turn some flight crews around almost as soon as they arrive. A stewardess on a flight leaving for Amman, Jordan, said she had arrived at Beirut only minutes earlier from Paris. The day before, her crew had flown round-trip to Europe, and the next day they were traveling to Geneva.

The result has been chaos in the airline’s timetable. Often, flights are changed only hours before their scheduled departure, and hybrid flights, with stops in different countries, are created because of the shortage of planes and crews.

Morning newspapers here carry flight announcements for later in the same day. Passengers are urged to appear at the airport three hours before a flight; often they end up waiting six hours.

Salaam said the most troubling problem is ground maintenance, since many of the senior mechanics are Christian and refuse to come to work. Routine maintenance is continuing, under armed guard, but major repairs are not being undertaken. Soon, more planes will be grounded.

‘Unfair to Punish Us’

Salaam said he has asked his Washington office to appeal to the State Department to reverse the American ban on his airline. “We’re a small airline,” he said, “and it’s unfair to punish us for this hijacking. We have always condemned armed aggression against airlines.”

But it is not clear that Middle East Airlines has suffered much more than a loss of prestige as a result of the American boycott.

One airline official conceded privately that the airline was not making much money on the New York route and is content to have a pool arrangement with British Airways, which holds 60 seats for Middle East Airlines passengers.

As for the ticket ban, Levon Berberian, a travel agent with offices in Los Angeles and Beirut, said business in his American office is booming.

American passengers wanting to travel to Beirut simply buy tickets for Damascus on some other airline and fly to an intermediate European stop, such as London or Paris. There, airlines such as British Airways and Air France endorse the tickets over to Middle East Airlines for the direct flight to Beirut.

“Frankly, when we read about this boycott, we laughed,” Berberian said. “We knew it would never work.”