"The FAA's Safety Scenarios Didn't Include Small Knives"

Tuesday, September 25, 2001    

The FAA's Safety Scenarios Didn't Include Small Knives
By STEPHEN POWER 
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


Of the scenarios that federal regulators imagined when setting
airplane-security standards, they didn't see small knives as a
potentially deadly threat.

Federal Aviation Administration officials worried about guns and
gasoline. They worried about bombs and kooks. But since the beginning of
airport-security screening, federal regulators have allowed knives and
other cutting instruments as long as four inches.

The fact that the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks used
short knives raises questions about how far Congress and the Bush
administration can go in crafting new security rules aimed at preventing
hijackings. It also underlines the challenge faced by the nation's
embattled airlines to reassure people that flights are safe.

"You can't plan for every contingency even if you wish you could," said
Richard Doubrava, security director for the Air Transport Association, a
Washington-based trade group that represents the airline industry. "They
may have boarded the planes with legitimate ticketing and legitimate
means and used a threat source that was never identified as a threat
prior to that."

As a result of the Sept. 11 hijackings, the FAA has sharply reversed
course, completely banning knives and other sharp objects. At some
airports, security guards have even prohibited passengers from carrying
aboard knitting needles and the blades in electric shavers.
 
Current and former agency officials say the policy allowing small knives
dates back more than 25 years, when a rash of aircraft hijackings led
the government to require that all passengers and their carry-on luggage
be screened before boarding.

"There wasn't a whole lot of science to it," said Richard Lally, who
headed the FAA's Office of Civil Aviation Security from 1974 until 1982.
"I think they just surveyed the average length of a normal
nonthreatening pocket knife like a man carries around to trim his
nails."

At the time, Mr. Lally said, some hijackers didn't even use weapons.
They would stick their hands in their pockets and threaten that they had
a gun. Or they would bring aboard bottles of water and say that they
contained gasoline.

"We had all sorts of [hijacking] scenarios, but we also had to be
reasonable," Mr. Lally added. "We didn't anticipate that people would
use the airplane as a weapon."

Billie Vincent, who headed the FAA's Office of Civil Aviation Security
from 1982 until 1986, said the agency briefly tightened its prohibition
on some knives during the early 1980s, in response to another rash of
aircraft hijackings. However, Mr. Vincent said he couldn't recall when
the agency went back to allowing four-inch knives, which could include
razor blades, hunting or fishing knives and other super-sharp, but small
weapons.

Witnesses aboard the doomed planes that were used in the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, some of whom called their loved ones on the ground,
said the hijackers were armed with box cutters, razor blades and other
sharp objects.

FBI investigators are still looking at whether the hijackers may have
had help from airport employees or contractors in getting access to
their weapons. But they haven't found specific evidence pointing to such
inside assistance at any airport involved, a senior official said. The
official added that agents are also investigating how knives and box
cutters believed not to be connected to hijackers got onto other planes
as part of the probe into whether there are airport security holes.FAA
spokeswoman Rebecca Trexler, citing what she characterized as a lack of
historical documents, said the agency had been unable to determine the
reasoning behind its knives rule.

"Before this horrible incident, no one believed terrorists would choose
knives as their weapon of choice," Ms. Trexler said. The agency's
records, she added, indicate that since 1977, there have been only 12
security-related incidents aboard planes involving knives. Six of those
incidents involved blades 4 inches or shorter, she said, but none were
"terrorist in nature or involved extreme violence."

Separately, the Air Line Pilots Association is expected to propose today
that pilots be allowed to carry firearms on commercial airliners.
Current regulations prohibit pilots from being armed in the cockpit. The
proposal will be a part a broad package of security-related
recommendations from the pilots' union, according to an ALPA official.

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