"Friendly vs. safe: The new era in flying"

Monday, November 19, 2001

Friendly vs. safe: The new era in flying 
By GREG SCHNEIDER, JAMES V. GRIMALDI, and ELLEN NAKASHIMA
The Washington (WA) Post


WASHINGTON -- Many Americans will be taking to the skies for a
Thanksgiving travel season unlike any other.

So much has changed, from rifle-toting National Guardsmen in airports to
pilots soon to be armed with stun guns. Yet as a new airport security
bill is signed this week, the whole notion that air travel can be made
safe from terrorism depends on more fundamental changes that have, until
now, remained stubbornly unachievable.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. airport security system has
routinely taken symbolic steps forward and then retreated under
compromises by lawmakers, government regulators, and airlines.

Previous legislation mandating background checks for all airport workers
and bomb-screening for all checked luggage has been largely ignored.
Some Federal Aviation Administration inspectors complain that their jobs
have been reduced to little more than make-work spot checks. And
airlines often pay only a fraction of FAA fines for security breaches.

The sense of urgency about fixing the system after a plane crash always
fades, but other forces that impede long-lasting reform do not. The
airlines have to make profits to stay in business. Americans want cheap
tickets so they can get around this big country, and they do not want to
wait in long lines.

The new airport security bill takes bold steps to change the old
pattern, including the provision to federalize the passenger-screening
workforce. But the authority to implement the law remains at the
Transportation Department, and much of the success of the new system
will depend on its willingness to get tough with airlines, government
watchdogs said. In the past, through the actions of the FAA, the
department has put a higher priority on what one frustrated airport
inspector called "a customer service-friendly atmosphere" than on strict
enforcement.

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta acknowledged the criticism in
an interview Friday, but he vowed that the Transportation Security
Agency created by the new legislation will be more effective. "I'm going
to make sure it is," he said.

Congress also has a long history of delaying and watering down its
demands in the face of lobbying from the airlines, one of the nation's
most influential industries.

"Security for the airlines for too long has been just another cost of
doing business," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., said during an
aviation oversight hearing last week.

This time, the stakes for change are higher than ever. And now that
Congress and the president have finally agreed on plans for a new
airport security system, supporters say the nation has reached a major
turning point. But the real fight will play out slowly, behind the
scenes, as government and industry struggle to overcome what has been a
consistent pattern of complacency and compromise.

In a conference call after the Sept. 11 attacks, top airline executives
told FAA Administrator Jane F. Garvey they would support critically
needed improvements in airline security.

Then, as Garvey talked specifics, the tenor changed. Knives, she said,
must immediately be banned from flights to prevent hijackers from using
them to commandeer jetliners, according to sources involved in the call.

One chief executive objected. "How will our passengers eat steak in
first class?" the executive asked.

"They can eat meatloaf," Garvey replied in frustration.

Even in the most serious predicament of modern aviation industry,
company officials were thinking about customer convenience.

Despite Garvey's snappy comeback, the FAA and Congress have a long
history of allowing such concerns to delay implementing costly or
inconvenient measures. The airlines and their trade groups have spent
more than $75 million on lobbying in the past four years to keep that
record intact.

The Bush administration will order criminal background checks for more
than 1 million airport workers -- 11 years after Congress demanded them.

Background checks for airport ramp workers were first proposed by a
presidential commission after the 1989 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103,
which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. They were mandated by Congress
in 1990, but the aviation industry resisted.

The airlines hired William Webster, former judge and director of the FBI
and CIA, to make their case.

Webster told FAA rule makers at a 1992 hearing that criminal background
checks for airport workers were a waste of time and money that could be
spent looking for would-be terrorists elsewhere. Representing the Air
Transport Association, Webster said the checks were akin to "the drunk
who was looking for his car keys only under a street lamp because the
light was better there."

Lawmakers also got personal calls from Webster. Rep. James L. Oberstar,
D-Minn., then in the majority on the House Transportation Committee,
said the visit left him incredulous that the former CIA and FBI director
was using his stature to stump for the airlines.

Only two years after mandating the checks, Congress reversed itself in
1992 and prohibited the FAA from spending any money to finish writing
the rule on background checks. The House Appropriations Committee said
the checks "will not effectively contribute to efforts to combat
terrorism or upgrade airline security. The committee believes the
airline industry's track record shows that the current system works."

Later, Senate appropriators lifted the ban, but they ordered the FAA to
"exercise greater discretion" in implementing the background checks.
Four years later, the FAA implemented a weakened rule that the airlines
and Webster had advocated -- requiring criminal history reviews only
when applicants have significant gaps in their employment history.

Then, in 1996, after a series of terrorist threats prompted a crackdown,
Congress passed another broad aviation anti-terrorism bill requiring
background checks -- this time for people who screened carry-on baggage
at airports.

But when that rule was issued two years later, the airlines persuaded
the FAA to adopt the same slimmed-down background-checking system
Webster advocated for ramp workers.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, tried to revive the issue of
complete background checks for all screeners and ramp workers last year.
But pressure from the industry forced her to exempt about 1 million
existing employees.

Finally, after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, the airlines could no
longer stop a decade of pressure from commissions, critics, and some
members of Congress. Garvey decided to require all employees who work in
secure areas of airports to have their criminal histories checked.

But the industry still won on the key point that drove their opposition
in the first place: the federal government is footing the bulk of the
cost, installing electronic fingerprinting machines at airports to do
the background checks.

After Pan Am 103, Congress took another major step meant to prevent
future bombings: Lawmakers ordered the FAA to screen all baggage with
bomb-detecting devices by November 1993. At that time, authorities
believed the greatest terrorist threat to aviation was explosives in
checked baggage.

The FAA missed the deadline, partly because the machines were slow and
had technical problems. But the General Accounting Office in 1994 also
blamed the FAA's research bureau for mismanaging the research and
development of the devices.

By 1998, the FAA finally began deploying the first certified detectors,
made by California-based InVision Technologies Inc. The company has
since installed 135 of its "CTX" bomb detectors in American airports and
more than 250 more overseas, at a cost of about $1 million each.

With Congress appropriating about $100 million a year to research,
develop and build the machines, another company became interested in the
work. L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. offered a competing product last
October, but some airline and FAA officials who looked into them came
away unconvinced.

Airlines "didn't want them because they didn't work," said a former top
FAA security official who worked with the devices. "They were
mechanically, operationally inferior."

So L-3 took its case to Capitol Hill. First, the company built the
manufacturing plant for its 3DX 6000 machines in Clearwater, Fla., home
turf of Republican Rep. C.W. Bill Young, chairman of the powerful House
Appropriations Committee.

Then L-3 hired lobbyists Albert Randall, the FAA's former assistant
chief counsel, and Linda Hall Daschle, former FAA deputy administrator
and wife of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D.

The connections apparently paid off. Today the FAA is buying dozens of
the machines, under an unusually explicit directive from Congress:
Wording inserted in last year's federal transportation budget orders the
FAA to purchase one L-3 machine for every model purchased from InVision.

The spending-bill provision, approved by Young's committee, justifies
Congress' intervention on grounds that FAA had not "effectively promoted
competition."

But last month, the Transportation Department's inspector general agreed
with industry critics that L-3's machines were not performing.

Of 15 L-3 machines delivered to the FAA by the end of last year, only
two were in use in airports, agency officials said. Four others were
being tested by the FAA, and nine others were sitting idle in warehouses
because of "operational problems," Transportation Department Inspector
General Kenneth M. Mead told Congress in testimony Oct. 11.

Frank C. Lanza, L-3 chief executive, acknowledges that the company has
had problems with its scanners.

"Reliability was less than we wanted, but that reliability has improved
very much," Lanza said.

Every time Congress has changed its mind about airport security, the FAA
was the government agency charged with carrying out the new policy.
Until 1996, the agency had the dual -- and often conflicting -- missions
of both enforcing regulations and promoting air travel. Congress took
away the promotional duties after then-Transportation Secretary Federico
Pena assured the public that ValuJet was a safe airline after its fatal
crash in Florida in 1996, and then a few days later grounded the
company's fleet of jets.

Under the airport security plan passed this past week, the FAA's parent,
the Transportation Department, will assume direct security
responsibilities that until now have been left to the airlines. The
airlines will have to contribute the $700 million that they currently
spend on airport security, according to Mineta.

Mineta said he is uncertain what role awaits about 500 field agents now
employed by the FAA to inspect airports around the country.

Through those agents, the government has consistently focused on
bureaucracy and procedure instead of on the broader issue of safety,
experts said. Nowhere is that more evident than in the interaction
between FAA field agents and private security contractors at airport
checkpoints.

Current and former FAA inspectors describe a frustrating situation where
they have had to follow overly strict procedures to test the quality of
security screeners, faced reprimands for being too assertive, and
watched airlines negotiate fines down to meaningless levels.

One FAA agent at a major East Coast airport said the inability to change
processes that were so obviously broken has left feelings of guilt in
the wake of Sept. 11.

"We really feel like we failed," said the agent, who asked not to be
identified for fear of reprisals.

Dan Boelsche, a former Argenbright Security Inc. supervisor at
Washington's Dulles International Airport, said he always felt
frustrated that the FAA did not require more training and that the
contracting system did not provide enough manpower or money for greater
training.

He also complained that the FAA agents never stepped back and looked at
the airport as a whole, coordinating security at doors and access points
with checkpoint screening.

Instead, he said, FAA agents ran their periodic sting operations, posing
as tourists and passing through checkpoints with fake weapons, "trying
to trick us." Many times the screeners recognized the undercover agents
because they were stationed at the airport or because they passed
through the checkpoint repeatedly.

One screener was cited for failing to use a bomb-residue scanner on a
nearly empty shopping bag, Boelsche said, when it was obvious from a
visual inspection that the bag was harmless. It ended up being a $6,500
fine that was levied against the airline, but paid by Argenbright.

>From the agents' point of view, the checkpoint testing was often little
more than make-work. The false weapons had to be packed in luggage under
strict guidelines set up jointly by the FAA and the airlines.

Any attempt to conceal the weapon inside the luggage, as a terrorist
would do, disqualified the test and made it impossible to cite the
screeners if they failed to catch the weapon on the X-ray machine.

Violations that led to fines often went unpaid. Airlines would let them
pile up, then negotiate settlements of as little as 10 percent of the
total amount due.

Mineta declined to comment on whether the FAA has fostered a culture of
accommodation for airlines.

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