A conference of a United Nations civil aviation agency was scheduled for today in Montreal, with United States and Swiss Government backing, to grapple with the difficult problem of finding means of preventing Arab terrorist attacks on commercial airliners. The U. S. State Department indicated that it planned to deal with the anti-Israel aspects of assaults on such planes by the approach of international talks through aviation officials.
State Department press officer Carl Bartch said that the United States has no plans to halt commercial air flights to Israel in the wake of a Swiss air plane crash which killed all 47 passengers and crew members, and an explosion in an Israel-bound Austrian airliner which caused no fatalities. Both have been attributed to Arab terrorists. Mr. Bartch said the State Department had instructed Charles Butler, U.S. representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization, the UN specialized agency with headquarters in Montreal, to seek a meeting of the ICAO. He added that “we expect some results” from the ICAO meeting “but we don’t know just what they will be.” He also said he had no information on whether the United States was taking any specific steps to strengthen security of international flights.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.