A wing and a prayer
How money woes and security snafus conspire against safer skies
Last week, security procedures around the nation were wildly uneven. A U.S. News reporter and photographer passed a bag of cameras, flashes, and even a tripod, through security in Portland, Ore., without it being opened. In Phoenix, two Northwest Airlines employees cleared security carrying a pocketknife and a corkscrew. But in Albuquerque, N.M., Gus Ghuneim found himself the subject of an intense search when he went through security. The 34-year-old physician, who was born in Beirut, said guards made him remove his belt and shoes, open a tin of mints he carried, and turn on an electric razor. At Baltimore-Washington International, Denise Gooden was detained and questioned by U.S. marshals for 45 minutes Friday morning after she tried to check her husband's shotgun--properly dismantled and encased--into baggage. (She was taking it to him for a hunting trip.) "They all agreed it was a learning process," she says, hugging the ticket agent who verified her story. "I would really rather be safe than have to be sorry and worry."
Some of the changes about to be implemented will be hard to spot. The FAA will increase the number of air marshals on flights. These secret plainclothes officers, who travel on a small number of flights, are equipped with special guns that shoot bullets that can kill a human but are designed not to pierce the fuselage. Israel's El Al Airlines, which has the world's most formidable airline security system, has armed officials in plainclothes on all flights--a system many advocated for the United States after last week's attacks. The FAA's air-marshal staff had suffered from budget cuts that had reduced their ranks to below 200 in the mid-1990s. But the FAA announced plans to deputize members of the elite Delta Force Army unit and other well-trained officers to start flying on commercial flights.
Random checks. Improvements in passenger profiling will also help. Until last week, the FAA's Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, simply told airlines to X-ray the baggage of passengers who aroused suspicion by, for example, buying one-way tickets with cash. Federal officials now plan to certify baggage-screening companies and increase the number of random baggage checks. They have already started to scan passenger lists for other suspicious characteristics, such as recent pilot licensing. Congress is pushing to have federal workers take over the screening of passengers and allow passengers to tote no more than one carry-on bag with them on flights.
Airport security officials are also scrambling. Philadelphia International Airport had fewer than 50 security cameras in the airport at the beginning of the year. In the next few months, they will install over 800. The cameras can be equipped with facial scanning and recognition software, which could allow screeners to match images of known criminals with passengers on their way to gates.
For all the talk now, even Scott Brenner, the chief FAA spokesman, questioned whether the newest measures wouldn't be abandoned soon. "In a month," he said, "you'll start to hear cries from passengers [delayed and annoyed by security checks]. And airlines will reflect what passengers want, and we will head back on some of these."
With Anna Mulrine, Margaret Mannix, Mary Lord, Jason Manning, Kit R. Roane and Rochelle Sharpe
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