A wing and a prayer
How money woes and security snafus conspire against safer skies
America's beleaguered air carriers returned to the skies in fits and starts last week as the Federal Aviation Administration warned travelers that security will be beefed up and asked for passenger forbearance. The forbearance part seemed actually to be happening. At Baltimore-Washington International Airport, more than 200 people stood in a queue to get tickets with hardly a sigh of complaint. But the security part--ranging from overzealous in some places to inattentive in others--was hardly comforting.
The battle over safety, it turns out, isn't just about terrorists. For years, two of the biggest impediments have been passengers and airlines. The first hate high ticket prices and long delays. The financially troubled airlines have long said they can't afford the additional costs of massive security upgrades.
"Resistance." Even after last week, that may still be the case. Just hours after the attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. News learned, airline executives balked at some federal proposals to increase security. For example, adding a final passenger check at the gate and stepping up screening of airport workers met with airline resistance, according to a source who attended meetings of the airlines, their industry groups, the FAA, and the Department of Transportation. The airlines agreed to most of the FAA's proposals, the source said, but only the less costly measures, like eliminating knives, and halting curbside check-in. A spokesman for the Air Transport Association of America, an airline industry group, called that account "unequivocally wrong." Michael Wascom said the airlines even suggested some of the measures, such as pre-boarding aircraft security sweeps and increasing uniformed police presence in airports. Wascom said the ATA is also calling on the federal government to take over the responsibility and expense of aviation security. "It's national security we're talking about," he says. "That's a government responsibility."
Other FAA recommendations aired at the meeting, such as fortifying the cockpit door, matching all bags to passengers, and significantly expanding the passenger-profiling system, were not immediately feasible, Wascom says. However, he says, they could eventually be implemented. One airline source also confirmed that not all the FAA's proposals were adopted.
The fight over safer skies is not a new one. Victoria Cummock served on a presidential commission on aviation safety and security after her husband was killed on Pan Am 103 over Scotland in 1988. Since then, Cummock says, she has seen "years of repeated industry resistance to anything that has to do with passenger safety or security." Airlines have consistently resisted a proposal to match each bag in the hold with a passenger on domestic flights. The recommendations of an FAA-funded study published last year, "Safe at Home? An Experiment in Domestic Airline Security," were resisted by the airlines. The airlines said bag matching would cost $300 million a year; the study said it would increase costs by only 40 cents a ticket and delay flights by an average of seven minutes.
But it's not just the airlines. The FAA bears some responsibility, experts say. FAA rules ban the carrying of guns and bombs, while knives, like those used by last week's terrorists, were considered so innocuous that FAA regulations permitted passengers to carry on any blade less than 4 inches long.
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
This story appears in the September 24, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.