"Security experts want pre-boarding questions changed"

Tuesday, August 1, 2000

Security experts want pre-boarding questions changed
By Gary Stoller
USA TODAY


The two pre-boarding questions that airlines are required to ask domestic
passengers are flawed, security experts say.

Former Federal Aviation Administration security director Billie Vincent says
that he urged the FAA more than a year ago to delete the words ''unknown to
you'' from the question ''Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry an
item on this flight?''

Vincent, who initiated the questioning process for international passengers
in 1996, says past terrorist incidents demonstrate that unwitting passengers
have tried to board flights carrying bombs given to them by someone they
knew.

In October 1986, a young Irishwoman, Anne Murphy, was duped by her Jordanian
boyfriend, Nezar Hindawi, into carrying a bag with 3 pounds of plastic
explosives when boarding an El Al Israel flight at London's Heathrow
Airport, British law enforcement officials say.

El Al personnel detected the explosives before Murphy, five months pregnant
with Hindawi's child and en route to Israel to marry him, boarded the jet.

Three months before the incident, a Texas man, Albert Lee Thielman, was
sentenced to 40 years in prison for placing a bomb in his wife's luggage on
an Austin-Dallas American Airlines flight. The bomb exploded after the plane
landed, and no one was hurt.

According to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, Cathal ''Irish''
Flynn, the FAA's associate administrator for civil aviation security, said
last year that nearly all the bombs given to passengers to carry on an
aircraft ''are given by people that passengers think they know very well.''

An FAA spokeswoman says that the FAA has formed a working group composed of
airline officials that is studying the wording of security questions.

Charlie LeBlanc, of Houston-based Air Security International, which provides
security for corporate travelers, agrees with Vincent.

''The question needs to be changed,'' he says. ''I believe the question is
currently worded that way because the airlines don't want to slow down the
boarding process and search everyone's bag.''

Dick Doubrava, security director for the Air Transport Association, which
represents U.S. airlines, says the FAA makes the final decision about the
wording of a question.

Security experts also criticize the other baggage-security question: ''Have
any of the items you are traveling with been out of your immediate control
since the time you packed them?''

Vincent and LeBlanc say it's a multipart question that fails to simply ask
who packed the bag. The question also doesn't take into account, Vincent
says, a bag that might be under a passenger's control, yet handled by
someone else.

Domestic travelers should be asked more than two questions, the experts say.

On flights abroad, the FAA says, it doesn't tell the airlines what to ask.
It requires carriers to determine five things about a passenger's bag, but
it won't disclose them.

Vincent and LeBlanc believe that domestic passengers are asked only two
questions to help airlines speed the boarding process.

Doubrava says airlines have never asked the FAA to keep the number of
questions to a minimum. ''There has been no effort by the industry to reduce
the amount of questions,'' he says.

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