How Safe Can We Get?

By Daniel Eisenberg

Just how does a plane become a guided missile? The answer, in part, is that the air-security system in the U.S. is porous in so many ways that a breach was not surprising--only the incomprehensible dimension of it. For aviation experts, who are all too familiar with the gaping holes in the nation's vast network of 100 large airports, there was a sad, easy explanation for Sept. 11: you get what you pay for.

For years, countless critics, from government watchdogs and consumer groups to industry officials, have railed against and exposed the nation's lax, inadequate airline-safety net, one they say has broken down in every aspect: policy, personnel, technology and oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration and Congress. After years of foot dragging, only recently has the FAA started to put stronger rules into effect, requiring more stringent employee background checks and training as well as mandating that all checked baggage be scanned by sophisticated bomb-screening devices--by 2014. Two weeks before the tragedy, a veteran pilot told TIME: "It's absurd to think we're safe."

Few of the nation's 670 million annual passengers would be that foolish any longer. On the contrary, the challenge now will be to convince flyers that the skies won't be dangerous. After a two-day shutdown, American air space reopened tentatively last Thursday, under a list of strict new rules that many experts have been demanding for more than a decade: banning curbside check-in or parking, forbidding family and friends to accompany passengers to the gate, having security personnel check all planes before passengers board, conducting random searches of flight crews and equipment, and prohibiting the transport of cargo or mail on passenger jets.

Most notably, in light of the primitive weapons used by the hijackers, passengers will be prohibited from carrying on any kind of knives or cutting devices--metal or plastic, utility, razor blades or box cutters, no matter how small--a ban already in place in countries such as Japan and Pakistan.

The FAA is contemplating increasing the use of armed, undercover air marshals on domestic flights, an action that nearly 80% of Americans support, according to a TIME/CNN poll conducted last week. Now fewer than 100 federal air marshals randomly travel on a very select number of domestic and international routes, down from a peak of more than 1,000 in the early 1970s, before concerns about airborne shoot-outs effectively sank the program. Some pilots are suggesting that an even better deterrent would be to have a uniformed security officer in the jump seat next to the cockpit.

By the end of the week, Americans were learning that "inconvenience is the price to pay for security," as Alan Taylor, a field engineer for an elevator company, said at Los Angeles airport on Friday. With bomb-sniffing dogs roaming the terminals, airline personnel asking pointed questions and armed guards holding machine guns, taking off will invariably take a lot longer. "If they don't open this bag and probe it, I'll be worried," said a traveler, Paul Pereda, an electrician from Woodbridge, Va.

Don't take too much comfort from these new measures. They won't necessarily fix what an industry expert calls the "dirty little secret of aviation." At its root is an inherent conflict of interest: profit-driven airlines are largely responsible for screening passengers. The more money and time they spend in that process, the less efficient and profitable they become. It's not that they strive to be lax, but security isn't their business. Last Thursday a Northwest Airlines flight crew in Phoenix, Ariz., deliberately got through security carrying a pocketknife and corkscrew, just to show how weak the system remains.

"We can promulgate all the regulations that the Secretary of Transportation wants, but the problem is who enforces them," says Charles Slepian, a New York-based attorney and outspoken critic of the FAA. "You cannot declare war against terrorists and then ask Continental Airlines to fight the battle for you."

Many believe that the government or a quasi-government airport authority, as in most foreign countries, from France to India, should take over responsibility for security--and fund it through taxes or surcharges. That way, the argument goes, the U.S. could have a standardized, coordinated professional law-enforcement approach to security, immune to the bottom lines of publicly traded companies.

"Airport-security chiefs agree something needs to be done about preboard screening," says Tom Shehan, chief of police at Dallas/Fort Worth airport. "Either privatize it, make it strictly government-run or under airport control. Just not the airlines." In the past, it was assumed that neither the government nor industry wanted to make this change. But the Air Transport Association has met with the FAA and Department of Transportation to argue that federalizing airport security may be the only answer. "This was an attack on national security, and that inherently is a government function," says Mike Wascom, spokesman for the A.T.A. The public agrees, according to the new TIME/CNN poll.

The suicidal behavior of the hijackers in the air will mandate a total revision of emergency procedures in the cabin. In the past, the idea was to try to keep hijackers calm and get the plane on the ground so negotiations could commence. Although airline staff members get annual training in handling hijackers, a kamikaze mission was not in any scenario. In the past, "if someone outside the cockpit was threatening to chop someone's head off, nine times out of 10, you'd open the door," says a Cathay Pacific pilot based in Hong Kong.

Some American pilots--and many are military vets--don't want to be holding just the yoke should that door open. Last week pilot chat sites were burning with a desire to rearm, a privilege revoked in 1987 when flight crews became subject to the same screening procedures as passengers, meaning they could no longer carry firearms. "It's probably the worst thing that ever happened," says Rick Givens, a retired USAir pilot and Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War.

As part of a security alert issued last week to its members, the Air Line Pilots Association recommended new measures to deal with any terrorist threat--depressurizing the aircraft or making drastic maneuvers to keep hijackers off balance; protecting the cockpit at all costs, regardless of what is happening in the rest of the plane; installing a dead bolt on the otherwise flimsy cabin door and eventually developing an impenetrable, high-tech portal that can still open in the event of an accident; and using an emergency crash ax if necessary as a "potential defensive weapon."

Even after recalibrating for the four fatal hijackings, air travel is still statistically safe in the U.S. But compared with the rest of the world, the U.S. takes the middle road when it comes to airport security. Israel's El Al still sets the highest standards (see box). Put up against Swiss-cheese operations such as those in the countries once part of the Soviet Union or Thailand, where corruption at the airport is endemic, the U.S. is a model of tightness. But compared with the top airports in Europe and Asia, the U.S. continues to lag. In India, only ticketed passengers can enter the terminal. Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur put international bags through a rigorous screening process. And in Europe, upstart budget carrier Ryanair bans most carry-on luggage.

A series of government oversight reports have served as a stinging indictment of the sorry performance here at home. Passenger screeners routinely miss about 20% of the weapons and explosives that FAA agents try to slip by them, according to the General Accounting Office (GAO). FAA agents have also found that it is easy to pose as an airport or airline employee or even as a law-enforcement agent.

From December 1998 to April 1999, Transportation Department investigators managed to breach airport security on 117 of 173 tries, a frightening 68% success rate--in some cases making it all the way to a seat on board just before takeoff. Investigators deliberately set off 25 emergency-exit alarms, only to find almost half of them ignored. They accomplished all this, according to the Inspector General's findings, with apparent ease, "piggybacking employees through doors, riding unguarded elevators, walking through concourse doors, gates and jet-bridges...and cargo facilities unchallenged, and driving through unmanned vehicle gates." The massive amount of construction going on at the nation's airports, including two of last week's suspect ones, Logan Airport in Boston and Newark airport in New Jersey, also gives slews of unauthorized workers room for mischief.

American Airlines, which flew two of the four jets commandeered, is facing a proposed $99,000 fine for violations on six flights in one day. The alleged transgressions, which American stresses were isolated and have been corrected, ranged from the mundane, such as forgetting to ask the two ridiculous screening questions, to the serious, such as flying luggage of passengers who weren't on board. American spokesman John Hotard says the airline spends tens of millions of dollars a year on security and that it "is the only carrier that has its own internal audit team that [every week] goes around various airports to audit not only American Airlines but our security operators."

The business of providing airport security is dominated by a few big companies, among them Argenbright Security, now owned by Securicor PLC of Britain, and Sweden's Securitas AB, which owns Burns International and Pinkerton. These firms win the business by being low bidder on contract proposals set out by the airlines. Here again an unfriendly dynamic may be at work. "Before Tuesday, the industry looked at security as a necessary evil that ate into a lot of its profitability," says Alan B. Bernstein, coo of Wackenhut, the private-security giant that pioneered passenger screening in the '70s. The company has been exiting the business because of the carriers' penny pinching.

The penny pinching, say critics, leads to shortchanging security: some firms never check job applicants for color blindness, even though high-tech screening equipment often uses color monitors to highlight suspicious shapes. Only last October, Argenbright, which is in charge of security at Dulles International Airport near Washington and at Logan, was fined about $1.5 million and pleaded guilty to allowing untrained employees, some with criminal backgrounds (including drug dealing and assault), to staff checkpoints at the airport in Philadelphia from 1995 to 1998.

An Argenbright executive defends the company's overall performance, noting that it processed more than 350 million passengers last year and confiscated more than 4,200 contraband items. As for the knives used on the Boston flights, "it appears that all the items used by the hijackers were permitted under FAA regulations," says Bill Barbour, president of Argenbright, which provides security for more than 40 U.S. airports, including 17 of the nation's busiest.

Given how thankless and tedious the security jobs are, ex-cons might be the only ones applying. Many screeners make little more than minimum wage, often without even the meager benefits that airport janitors get, while their counterparts in European countries earn two to three times that and--surprise, surprise--stay on much longer. With at most a high school diploma and sometimes not speaking fluent English, these crucial gatekeepers often have to work an additional job or two just to pay the rent, and they arrive for duty exhausted.

It's no surprise, then, that after only a few months at work, screeners are more than ready to move on. At Logan, for instance, the annual turnover rate from May 1998 to April 1999 was 207%, and Dulles had a slightly more respectable 90%, according to a study by the GAO. St. Louis airport was the worst, with a staggering 416% turnover rate, meaning that the entire screening staff changed every three months.

So what else, outside of a complete government takeover, can be done to improve security? At the simplest level, many experts recommend requiring all passengers to make a positive identification of their luggage before boarding and not allowing any other bags on the plane--a practice that has been standard in most of the rest of the world since the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie. U.S. carriers have consistently griped that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to introduce passenger-bag matching. The FAA is now reconsidering it.

In the past year, the agency, and not just the airlines, has gained certification authority over private security contractors, which, theoretically at least, should help weed out the worst performers. The FAA's new background-check guidelines may also help, but as usual, they are filled with loopholes. All security workers who started before Dec. 23, 2000, are grandfathered and don't have to be checked against a database for criminal records.

Did accomplices plant knives on the doomed planes? Perhaps not, but there remains the general problem of lost or misplaced identification badges that give workers access to restricted areas. They often end up in the wrong hands. Two were stolen in April, for instance, from the Rome hotel rooms of an American Airlines pilot and flight attendant. Under current guidelines, authorities have to report the disappearance of a badge or reissue all cards only if 5% of the total vanish, which means that at a major airport like Logan, 600 have got to be missing before anything has to be done about it.

Technology, as always, will play a part in improving security. The question, as always, is when and who pays for it? Most of the major U.S. airports have an advanced $1 million CTX scanning machine that can detect explosives. The problem is, these units are not used all that often and are reserved primarily for so-called suspicious bags. In March 2000, DOT Assistant Inspector General Alexis Stefani told a congressional committee that more than half the powerful machines were screening fewer than 225 bags a day, despite the fact that they are capable of scanning that many in just an hour.

The few bags that are scanned this way are flagged with the help of a computer-assisted profiling program. While the success rate of profiling, which looks for telltale signs such as people paying with cash or changing travel plans at the last minute, isn't yet clear, the growing practice is controversial, viewed by some as a potential attack on civil liberties. But after Tuesday, the American public may be shedding its qualms. More than half those interviewed in the TIME/CNN poll said it would be acceptable to profile by age, race and gender to help identify suspicious passengers. And thanks to a new software program dubbed the Threat Image Protection System that will soon appear on X-ray machines across the nation, the FAA will periodically be able to paint virtual images of guns or explosives onto the monitor to test and better prepare screeners for the real thing.

Scientists are busy developing even more advanced detection schemes--from digital bomb sniffers and 3-D holographic body scanners to biometric, facial-recognition systems that can potentially be used to check passengers against an electronic national counterterrorism database. "Terrorists aren't born overnight. They are indoctrinated, schooled," says Joseph Atick, founder of Visionics, which has deployed its technology at an Iceland airport, at English stadiums to keep out soccer hooligans and, controversially, this summer in the entertainment district of downtown Tampa, Fla. "Somebody checks your credit card when you buy something. Why can't we check if you're a terrorist or not when you're boarding a plane?" Unfortunately, after last week, that's one more question Americans wish they knew the answer to.

--Reported by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas, Sally B. Donnelly/Washington, Eric Francis/Boston, Paul Cuadros/Raleigh, Julie Rawe and Andrea Sachs/New York, Margot Roosevelt/Los Angeles, Greg Land/Atlanta and other bureaus

With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas, Sally B. Donnelly/Washington, Eric Francis/Boston, Paul Cuadros/Raleigh, Julie Rawe and Andrea Sachs/New York, Margot Roosevelt/Los Angeles, Greg Land/Atlanta and other bureaus