"Tough Issues on Baggage Screening Remain"

Tuesday, November 5, 2002

Tough Issues on Baggage Screening Remain
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York (NY) Times


WASHINGTON, - Airport security screeners are about to begin opening
hundreds of thousands of pieces of checked baggage every day, but key
questions about security and liability have not been resolved,
government officials and airline and airport executives say.

The Transportation Security Administration, created by Congress a year
ago, is supposed to screen all checked baggage for bombs beginning Jan.
1, but the two main ways it will do the job require that many bags be
opened. Among the unresolved issues is how screeners would open locked
bags, who would be responsible if a traveler claimed that something
inside was stolen or damaged, and who would have to get the bag to its
owner if the security search caused the bag to miss the flight.

"It's a fairly big problem," said Randall H. Walker, director of
aviation at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.

At the moment, Mr. Walker said, his first concern is "chaos in my
terminal" because screeners will not be able to process bags fast
enough. The percentage of bags screened is supposed to rise to 100 by
Jan. 1.

The airlines, which sometimes spend more than $100 to deliver a suitcase
to the owner if the bag misses the original flight, are particularly
concerned with who would pay if the missed flight was the fault of
security and not the airline. But another issue is the new procedure for
searching bags, largely out of the owner's presence.

The issue is so sensitive that there is even debate over who will tell
the public. The airlines believe that the solution is for passengers not
to lock their bags, but they want the government to announce that to the
public. The airlines also want the government to tell travelers that it
is the government, and not the airlines, that will be conducting the
searches. 

The airlines and airports are hoping that Congress will extend the Dec.
31 deadline in at least some places. But the liability and logistical
issues will exist in at least some places even if the Transportation
Security Administration gets extensions at some airports. Most of the
problems from liability to logistics require decisions from the security
agency, but airline and airport executives concede that their are no
easy solutions.

Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, very few bags were opened, and the
Federal Aviation Administration, which was then in charge of security,
required that the owner be summoned to open the bag, to reduce the risk
of a security guard being hurt by a booby trap. But under the system now
evolving, many bags will be opened out of view of the passenger, in back
rooms where luggage is sorted for loading on airplanes.

In fact, the preferred solution at most airports is to put the screeners
and their equipment in the back rooms, where the conveyor belts carry
the bags on their way to the planes.

"Those bag rooms aren't big enough for the bags, let alone all the
people they'd put down there," said Todd Hauptli, a spokesman for the
American Association of Airport Executives. "And there's a whole lot of
bags that need to be opened up."

The performance of the screening machines is a loosely guarded secret.
The machines that scan whole bags at a time are said to reject 25 to 30
percent of them; those machines measure the density of objects inside,
and sometimes cannot distinguish between explosives and chocolate.

Most of the bags rejected by these machines must then be opened.

The other main system is called trace detection, in which a technician
rubs a gauze pad over objects to be tested, and then feeds the pad to a
machine that analyzes it for explosive traces. These are becoming
familiar to travelers at the passenger checkpoints.

For checked baggage, the Transportation Security Administration plans to
rub the outside of 40 percent of the bags, rub the pad briefly over the
inside in 40 percent of the bags, and rub down objects inside the bag in
the last 20 percent; that means opening 60 percent of the bags.

To get started, the government plans to have 1,100 of the bulk
detectors, which can cost more than $1 million each, and 5,000 of the
trace detectors. In general, the big machines will go to the big
airports and the trace systems to the smaller ones, although many
airports will have both. Passengers check about 1 billion bags a year. .

With bags being searched outside their owners' sight, one question is
whether a claim of theft or breakage would go to the airline or the
Transportation Security Administration. Pilferage is already a problem
and could get larger if passengers are told not to lock their bags.

The liability question creates "fairly uncertain terrain," said Kenneth
P. Quinn, an aviation lawyer and former chief counsel of the Federal
Aviation Administration. "In the past, the liability has not stuck to
the government; it's been an airline responsibility," he said. "One
would assume that with the federalization of security, the airlines will
be able to say, `Go talk to the federal troops that opened your bag.' "

At the Transportation Security Administration, Brian Doyle, a spokesman,
said that "the issues are in process," and that no decisions had been
announced. Airline and airport officials say, however, that the agency
has been in such a rush to procure and install equipment and hire and
train screeners that the questions have been barely addressed.

"I don't think anyone has really focused on what the true implications
are," said Robert W. Poole Jr., a transportation expert at the Reason
Foundation, a libertarian think-tank in Los Angeles.

Not all the bags will be searched in back rooms. In places where the
government has had to install screening machines in the lobbies, bags
will be searched there, perhaps in plain sight of everyone waiting to
check bags, according to experts. This, too, could create security
problems, experts say. 

"It's almost as effective to get something exploding in an airport as in
an airliner," said Seth Young, an airport expert at Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University. Dr. Young was speaking on Friday at a
conference here on aviation security at the Aviation Institute of George
Washington University.


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