Congress to tackle air safety

09/20/2001

By JIM MORRIS / The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – Airline industry officials and lawmakers have heard and offered many suggestions to improve security since the Sept. 11 hijackings of four commercial airliners: arming pilots, fortifying cockpits and federalizing airport screeners among them.

House and Senate committees scheduled three hearings for Thursday and Friday with the aim of thoroughly reviewing security standards. Two task forces have been appointed by U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta.

"September 11, 2001, has changed this country, and I think the airlines will recognize the importance of reasonably strengthened security," said Sen. George Allen, R-Va., a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which will hold one of the hearings.

Critics point out, however, that two White House commissions and Congress have been given broad authority over the years to fix a flawed security system only to back off in many cases when pressured by airline officials.

"I've been horrified at the lack of response by our government to secure the flying public," said Victoria Cummock, who served on a 1996 commission appointed by President Bill Clinton and was a liaison to a commission appointed in 1989 by President George Bush. "Promises are often made at the outset of a disaster, but only time will tell how much – or how little – they'll do."

A member of the 1996 commission said the panel's recommendation led the FAA to buy hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of explosive-detection equipment – although he acknowledged not all of that equipment has been properly deployed.

"The focus of aviation security has been to keep weapons and explosives off of aircraft," said Jack Beauchamp, a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology. "What happened last week – where the airplane itself became a weapon in the hands of terrorists – isn't something that was talked about."

Ms. Cummock, whose husband, John, was killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, filed a formal dissent to the 1996 commission's final report.

In a letter to Vice President Al Gore, the commission's chairman, she wrote that "Some previous recommendations were omitted entirely, others were included but reduced to a nebulous, inactionable mention, while a large number contained language that was either unnecessarily misleading or non-specific in order to give the perception of recommended change."

Ms. Cummock said that she was upset, for example, at the commission's refusal to embrace the idea of a passenger bag matching system on all domestic flights, a program still not in use.

Bag matching, meant to keep bombs from being placed on airplanes in unaccompanied luggage, as happened with Pan Am 103, is required on all international flights to and from the United States. Any bag not positively linked to a passenger must be pulled off the plane.

The airline industry has firmly opposed a full domestic bag matching system. While it sounds good in principle, its implementation would disrupt the tight schedules necessitated by the nation's hub-and-spoke airport network, said Dick Doubrava, manager of security for the Air Transport Association, a trade association for all major airlines.

"If you took a 15-minute delay in departure at the beginning of the day [due to the removal of a suspect bag] you could have an airplane that was two or three hours behind schedule by the end of the day," Mr. Doubrava said.

A recent study by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, however, found that such a system would be neither as disruptive nor as expensive as the industry claims. The study estimated that such a program would add only 50 cents to the cost of each ticket.

In place of a full domestic bag matching system, the Gore Commission endorsed a computerized passenger profiling system designed to root out would-be terrorists based on certain types of pre-flight behavior: purchasing a one-way ticket, paying in cash. This, too, has not worked, said Neil Livingstone, owner of a Washington-based security firm.

Although the commission rejected the idea of profiling based on ethnicity, fearing discrimination against passengers of Middle Eastern descent, Mr. Livingstone said that such profiling forms the backbone of Israel's vaunted aviation security system.

Security officials for the national air carrier, El Al, are highly trained and given great latitude to question passengers, Mr. Livingstone said. "If something doesn't seem right about you, they can pull you out of line," he said.

In its final report in 1990, the Bush Commission concluded that the U.S. aviation security system "is seriously flawed and has failed to provide the proper level of protection for the traveling public." Among other things, the commission recommended the screening of cargo and mail carried in the holds of passenger aircraft.

The Aviation Security Improvement Act, passed by Congress the same year, merely called for a study of the issue. Eleven years later, airlines continue to rely on the word of airport freight contractors. "Nothing going into the cargo holds of [passenger] aircraft is being screened," Mr. Livingstone said.

Ms. Cummock, who has testified before Congress more than two dozen times, said that she will follow this week's hearings – and the upcoming task force reports – with interest and trepidation. She is already discouraged, she said, because neither of the task forces has passenger representation.