Flying Blind, Flying Safe

by Mary Schiavo with Sabra Chartrand
© 1997, 1998 by Mary Schiavo
Paperback, contains new and updated material

CHAPTER TEN – TWA Flight 800

Running the Inspector General's office was a little like playing football at Ohio State – three yards and a cloud of dust. It was not a passing game. I fought battles one at a time, incrementally chalking up successes in major safety areas: airplane parts, airport security, maintenance, inspections, training. But I remained unable to break through the FAA's inertia and defensiveness to conquer the disorder at its core that allowed negligence and incompetence to dominate. I won skirmishes once I learned to sidestep the FAA, to join investigative forces with the FBI, U.S. Attorneys or the General Accounting Office, and to deliver my findings to certain members of Congress, the White House, the administration and the press. But I realized that my individual victories would never change the FAA. The agency could not be affected from within. Countless times over the years, I had watched in dismay as the FAA lumbered along, creating task forces and assigning studies, only to jump through hoops after an air tragedy and in the glare of television spotlights. I checked my anger and muttered instead about the Tombstone Agency. The FAA dealt with safety only in a crisis.

The tragic, troubled history of ValuJet had amply illustrated that sad lesson. ValuJet was the distilled essence of the corrosion from within at the FAA and the failings of the aviation industry. But Wall Street loved start-up airlines like ValuJet, and the FAA protected them as integral to a healthy aviation economy. It was the written policy of Secretary Peña and the Administration to protect start-ups, the low-cost carriers. Lobbyists ensured that regulations were friendly to them. In the end, it was inevitable that this house of cards would fall. Passengers paid with their lives. And just days after ValuJet fell from the sky, Secretary of Transportation Federico Peña appeared on national television to assure Americans that ValuJet and all airlines like it were safe. What was Peña talking about?

The ValuJet crash thrust before the public the fact that an inferior airline was allowed to continue flying because of economic pressure. Only public outrage forced Peña to finally acknowledge that Congress should eliminate the FAA's dual mandate to promote aviation.

After all, it wasn't the first time that hazardous materials had caused a terrible accident on a plane, nor the first time that a disaster might have been averted if the cargo hold had been properly equipped with smoke and fire warning systems. The FAA knew this; the airlines knew it; the NTSB, the Department of Transportation and its Inspector General all knew it. Perhaps the only ignorant players in the game were the passengers. Yet even after 110 of them died in the Everglades, Peña went on television to defend his agency and ValuJet. Still, Peña seemed to underestimate the significance of the mandate.

"This led to the unacceptable perception that the FAA had to make choices between ensuring safety and promoting the industry it regulates." That was it. He thought the problem was solved.

I was working at home on my computer when Peña took to the airwaves. As I heard his comments from the television across the room, my fingers froze over the keyboard. Was Peña ignorant of the true nature of the FAA? Or had the FAA spoon-fed him this line about the dual standard being no big deal? Whether he believed it himself or not, he and the FAA knew they could utter pablum about the FAA mandate and nobody would be the wiser. They counted on the public not knowing what the mandate really means to the FAA. Peña's recommendation to Congress, no doubt supported at the FAA, was to tweak the wording of the mandate, not to dig out the root of the problem. In truth, the mission is much more than just a few words in the act. It is threaded throughout the legislation, just the way the culture of promoting aviation is woven throughout the FAA, inherent in its practices, its policies, and the people who work there. Eliminating a few lines in the law won't change the agency's entrenched favoritism toward the aviation industry.

That culture propelled Peña to face the public after the ValuJet crash like a nervous cheerleader whose team was forty points down in the fourth quarter. His carefully crafted explanations that ValuJet was safe were meant to prevent the public from reacting with hysteria to the truth. But the Department of Transportation wanted to prevent hysteria not to safeguard the public, but to protect the moneymaking status quo of the airline industry, and especially the low-cost or start-up carriers. The ValuJet crisis trained a floodlight on one of the more striking FAA fallacies that, once certified, an airline is always safe. That if an airline is not safe, it cannot fly. Those are simply myths. No one at the FAA or in the aviation industry wants to acknowledge that vast differences exist among airline maintenance facilities, the age and quality of aircraft, the caliber of spare-parts inventory and programs for screening bogus parts, the qualifications and experience of pilots and crew, and security practices. The public believes that caring professionals at the FAA regulate all of that through a finely honed, carefully orchestrated network of safety laws. The FAA does not want consumers to believe any differently. In reality, the FAA is at a loss to know how to deal with this new style of airline business, and with new threats to airplanes. The discount airlines that appeared and grew rapidly in the late 1980s and 1990s left the FAA stunned and blinking at a whirlwind of leased and used planes, contracted and subcontracted maintenance facilities, and inexperienced pilots and flight crews. But the FAA's inertia sent a message: what the public doesn't know can't hurt it. And the agency amply demonstrated that it wouldn't challenge that assumption until a major plane disaster claimed hundreds of lives.

And sometimes not even then.

In 1993, I learned that the FAA's abhorrence of action extended to airport security. As I discussed briefly in the introduction, plainclothes agents from my office sneaked into some of the nineteen busiest airports in the U.S. They wandered around in off-limits areas, seldom challenged by airport or airline employees. We saw other people milling about without proper identification, and they weren't stopped, either. Once my agents got into these supposedly secure areas, they walked around aircraft parking spaces, baggage processing centers, maintenance areas and ramp administrative offices. They got onto planes and into cargo holds. They wore no identification, dressed casually and didn't even pretend to belong there. They also carried guns, knives, fake bombs and a deactivated hand grenade through security screening points and x-ray machines. When we reported the lax state of airport security, our findings caused a stir in the media, on Capitol Hill, among the airlines and even at the Department of Transportation. The FAA noted that it "concurred" with virtually all of our recommendations to fix airport defenses. Unfortunately, agreement did not necessarily mean action.

So when I decided, in 1995, that we should repeat our security audit, I expected that most of the more obvious breaches would prove to be corrected. We decided to put particular emphasis on bomb detection this time, too. But I was bitterly disappointed: in 1995, my agents, together with FAA inspectors, carried fake bombs strapped to their bodies or in briefcases, marzipan candy or other substances arrayed on boards to look like plastic explosives, and guns and knives through metal detectors. They got in secure areas at the big international airports around the country.

They were not stopped 40 percent of the time.

Early in the summer of 1996, I gathered up the final report on airport security and made my way toward the FAA Administrator's office. I wasn't looking forward to this meeting. The FAA didn't like me, and had never liked my reports, and if I had somehow missed that message, a fresh signal had just been sent. Secretary Peña had been scheduled to come to this meeting; in fact, he had called it. But then his office must have discovered that the latest airport report was not substantially different from the 1993 study. So he bowed out of the briefing. The message seemed clear to me. The Secretary was seeking Washington's best protection – deniability. Peña didn't want to know about the security report. Since I insisted on discussing it; the Secretary had apparently decided not to hear me. Instead, he left it to the FAA Administrator.

Hinson's demeanor was familiar: he was his usual easygoing self. I fully expected the FAA staff and the Secretary's underlings not to like our findings, but I wasn't prepared for what emerged as the real point of our meeting: they wanted me to bury the report. The Olympic Games were opening in Atlanta that same month. I rustled the papers in front of me; the dismal truth was right there in black and white. I reminded the nonchalant FAA faces of the bomb-detection failure rates. At the nation's biggest, busiest airports. I spoke of my agents' success in getting past security almost half the time at many of those same airports. Their expressions did not change. They chose to interpret our study their way: there was no real chance of a major attack, bombing or hijacking of an airline, airport or particular flight, they pointed out. The investigation might have miserable results, but "the threat is low," they kept repeating. Thousands of planes take off and land every day, yet people are in greater danger just driving their cars. What good would it do to upset the public and generate a lot of negative publicity right before the Olympics?

I couldn't say that an attack was imminent. Still, I knew that the number of attempted bombings had skyrocketed in recent years. And it made me nervous that no one could be sure an attack wasn't inevitable, and that I was one of the few people who knew that if a bomber made a move on an airport, he stood a pretty good chance of success. How could a few bureaucrats in a Washington office determine the odds? I thought of the World Trade Center, the trials in New York City of the terrorists responsible for that attack, the Oklahoma City bombing. In October 1995 and August 1996, supporters of the man on trial in New York for masterminding the World Trade Center bombing had threatened to attack a number of U.S. carriers. The threats were taken seriously enough for the department to quietly boost security in places like Kennedy Airport. In 1995, Secretary Peña had warned that American airports "are not immune" to terrorist threats, and urged facilities to buy bomb-detection equipment and hire a "competent, highly motivated security workforce." Did the FAA think that was enough to tighten the safety net around airports? Apparently it was confident enough in the departmental edict and scared enough about bad publicity from my office's report. It just couldn't stomach more public exposure of how insecure U.S. airports really were.

The FAA did try to get airports to do a better job screening. In January 1996, it warned airline and airport managers at major airports across the country that there were serious problems not only with airline screening processes, but with the airports' security procedures. I found out later that they released to the airlines the very information they wanted me to withhold, and warned that it was publicly available information – the failure rates at all category X, or large, international airports. Successful checkpoint screening was "well below the national average," and bomb detection was poor. For example, O'Hare was in sixteenth place among nineteen big international airports. The FAA said its people watched 1,500 bags go through checkpoints, and saw only one opened for closer inspection.

"These kinds of results are disturbing in that it is hard to believe that approximately 1,500 bags went through without anything suspicious being observed, necessitating a hand search," an FAA official wrote to O'Hare managers. "This leads me to believe that many screeners are just going through the motions."

The official also complained that hardly any bags were x-rayed, pointing out that "this is extremely unusual when, you consider that a good Explosive Detection System will normally identify approximately 30 percent of baggage as being suspect . . .

"If one of the issues aforementioned is found, it is reason for concern and closer scrutiny," the FAA said. "However, when all the reviews result in the aforementioned, the system is ineffective and needs to be addressed and corrected."

Even though the FAA was urging airports and airlines to improve their security, it wanted me not only to ignore the alarms raised by my agents' experiences in airports, but to hide them from the public. No. I couldn't do it. It was too risky to hold the report back, not just so the FAA would not get a black eye, again. My staff had come up with vital information, and it wasn't up to me to decide the public couldn't handle it. I contended that the security report was so important that not only should it be released immediately, it should be delivered directly to the President.

But mine was the minority opinion in that office that day. The most the FAA officials and the Secretary's representative would agree to was to send a copy of the report to the National Security Adviser. The FAA, with the backing of the Secretary of Transportation, remained convinced it was best to withhold the report from the public indefinitely. Leaving the meeting, chilled, I wondered for the umpteenth time what good these investigations were doing when the department constantly whitewashed or downplayed them. And what about my professional responsibility, not to mention my personal obligation, to let people know what we'd found?

As I walked back to my office, I knew passengers were surging through Kennedy and the other airports in our report. What about their rights, their fates? Hadn't their taxpayer dollars paid for this investigation? Uneasy, I told my staff to prepare the report for my signature before the Fourth of July holiday. I would send it to the Secretary and to the Congress before the long weekend. I didn't want anyone to say I held the study back any longer than necessary. Even so, it never made it out of the department until after the political conventions, the Olympics and the TWA disaster. Right before the long weekend, the Department of Transportation insisted I hold on to the report; they were simultaneously requesting that the document be classified.

I knew I could no longer stay in my job. Once again, the FAA was manipulating a potential public relations crisis without a thought for the safety issues involved. The Secretary of Transportation's office was assisting cover-up by insisting the report should be classified, even though the classifiers had already approved it for release. They didn't really care that the airport security report wouldn't qualify for classification; it would take weeks to figure that out, and by then the Olympics would be over, the goal accomplished, the crisis past.

I knew then that it was hopeless. Every major change I'd been able to force through had come without the help, understanding or assistance of the FAA and the Secretary or his staff. The FAA could not resolve its split personality. The airline industry was too powerful to thwart, the Department of Transportation was solidly behind it, Secretary Peña did not seem to comprehend the significance of many issues and was unwilling to act when necessary and the vast potential power of the average consumer was blocked because the truth about aviation safety was kept from the public. Even the grounding of ValuJet came as a result of pressure from the media and a White House embarrassed by its Secretary of Transportation and FAA Administrator.

The reluctance of the Secretary to take a stand on the airport security report struck me as glaring. Where was his grandstanding now? Why was he not eager to go on television and discuss this latest development in aviation?

If I expected change, I knew I had to devise yet another strategy to circumvent the FAA, to find a way to offer my concerns about safety and security directly to the public. I had to leave my job, the department and government altogether. I had to resign, even though it meant leaving the airport security report behind and unprotected. The Department of Transportation was adrift, blown wherever the winds of a media event or crisis carried it. The Secretary offered no leadership, no knowledge or understanding, no accountability. The Administrator of the FAA was a figurehead. Neither of them heeded NTSB recommendations; neither one followed through on the many reports detailing safety problems at the FAA. Looking around the table at the meeting on the security report, I'd felt painfully defeated for the first time. Nothing would change as long as I sat in rooms like this. I couldn't continue working in a place where all we did was sit around, waiting for people to die.

On July 3, I wrote my letter of resignation, but because of the long holiday weekend, I could not find anyone at the White House to take the letter until July 8. A week later, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Aviation asked me to explain why I left my job. I had asked that my appearance be limited because I was six months into a difficult pregnancy. Nevertheless, the panel questioned me for many more hours than I expected. They seemed most concerned that I intended to speak and write publicly on what I knew about aviation safety. Transportation Secretary Peña and Administrator Hinson were there, too, and they seemed determined to distance themselves from any responsibility for the problems at the FAA that I complained about. The Inspector General had never warned him about ValuJet, Peña told the senators. He had no knowledge, he insisted, of how deep the crisis ran at the discounter, and he found it very troubling that I had implied that alarm bells should have been ringing all over the Department of Transportation for months.

It was this kind of revisionist pablum that had driven me from my job. As soon as it was my turn again at the microphone, I explained to the panel that months before, the Secretary's own Chief of Staff, Ann Bormolini, had, at the request of her close personal friend, a ValuJet lobbyist, asked me what I was doing snooping into ValuJet. I told the senators that in response to this unusual request, I'd written a stern memo outlining what the FAA and my office were doing about ValuJet. Did Peña expect us to believe that he had no idea what his Chief of Staff did every day in the office suite they shared?

I was exhausted when I got home. I fell asleep early. It was July 17.

"There's been another crash. It doesn't look good," I heard my husband say through my fog of sleep. "A TWA jet crashed into the ocean."

I got up and followed him to the television. TWA flight 800 had just plummeted into the Atlantic in a ball of flames off Long Island. Ugly orange flames dancing in the darkened sea on our television screen mesmerized my husband and me, just as millions of other people sat glued to the same pictures. The pattern of fire on the ocean traced a vicious outline of destruction that seemed to offer little hope for survivors. A familiar, wrenching dread tugged at me. Only too recently I'd stared blankly at the same TV, shocked and sickened by the ragged remains of the ValuJet plane that had smashed into the swampy Everglades. Struggling to absorb the unthinkable, I stared at another watery surface. Somewhere down below was the shattered cylindrical tomb of hundreds of innocent passengers. Echoes of ValuJet questions bounced around my head. Had the TWA jet crashed because an incompetent mechanic missed something? Because a bogus part sold to the airline by shady dealers had failed? Because the plane was so old it was falling apart but the airline had convinced the compliant authorities to extend its flying time? Or was the plane blown out of the sky because lax security had permitted a bomb to be hidden on the plane or slipped aboard as luggage or cargo?

That a bird might have flown into an engine or that lightning could have struck the plane never occurred to me. More likely that shoddy maintenance, an aging aircraft or lax security had led to the crash. The odds against a catastrophe like that were not a zillion to one. That's what the public believed. That's what the FAA told them, and what the airlines repeated constantly. But the failings in aviation maintenance systems that brought down the ValuJet plane hadn't been corrected, nor had loose security procedures at many airports been tightened. After my agents filed their reports on airline parts, maintenance, and airport security, none of us would fly certain airlines. We wouldn't let our families get on planes under certain conditions. We used what we knew to protect ourselves and our loved ones. The public hadn't been given the same advantage. The airlines didn't want the flying public making demands about security or parts integrity, and they didn't want reports of unsafe carriers to scare people away from air travel. And what the airlines wanted, the Federal Aviation Administration wanted, too. Since protecting the public would often have required criticizing the aviation industry, over the decades the FAA learned to keep its opinions and its findings to itself.

For two weeks after TWA flight 800 blew up, I sat through interview after interview on television as the country tried to sort out what could have gone wrong with the flight. Yet it was difficult for me to reassure the public when I knew about the FAA's sloppy safety and security record. To be sure, many FAA field employees are hardworking civil servants, men and women who have devoted their careers to aviation. They fly all the time, and so do their families and friends. Many FAA inspectors helped my office with investigations, reports and testimony before Congress. Senior FAA officials tried to reach compromises with my office and with the NTSB. But most of the time we pursued opposite goals. The FAA wanted peace with the Inspector General and the NTSB, but it wanted harmony by convincing us to lay off, to leave its officials to do their jobs as they always had. Planes are not falling out of the sky, the FAA kept saying. Aircraft are not crashing. Stated over and over, this agency mantra was a blanket justification for business as usual.

But, in fact, planes were falling out of the sky.

In the end, the Olympics were overshadowed by the breathless, staccato voices of news anchors updating the body count from the explosion of TWA flight 800, and speculating on the chemical residue covering airplane parts pulled from the sea, the possibility of a mechanical failure, and mind-boggling theories of surface-to-air missiles. When the plane's black box was recovered, it held few clues because it was one of the older, less sophisticated recorders that the NTSB had for years wanted to see replaced. My office's knowledge that a bomb could easily be carried through an airport like Kennedy, into cargo areas and even onto a plane still had not been made public. It hadn't been released to the airlines or the airport administrators, either. The report was finally issued in September, after the Democratic National Convention was safely over. It barely caused a ripple. All the information about infiltration of airports with bombs was blacked out, as were the rates of failure to detect security threats at each airline. The FAA had the audacity to call these heavily censored pages a "good-news report." It was not. But the agency's response showed that in spite of Peña's disavowal of the FAA mandate, business continued as usual. The entrenched culture of working hand in hand with the aviation industry endured. The same officials who carried out agency business before Peña's announcement continued in their jobs afterward, and would stay at their posts even if Congress did change the FAA statute.

In the year before TWA flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, the FAA had cobbled together a group of aviation officials, each a manager from an airline, and anointed them the Airport Security Advisory Commission. Their job was to decide whether the Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990 needed further strengthening. Never mind that many of the act's provisions – like bomb-screening machines – that were supposed to be in place by 1993 still had not been implemented. The commission was supposed to go ahead, anyway, and consider reports and studies about terrorists, plastic explosives, bomb-sniffing dogs and million-dollar machines that scan luggage. The members surely knew that in 1995, 165 people died because of domestic terrorism, yet 42,000 died in car crashes. They probably agreed with FAA logic that people shouldn't be scared away from flying and forced to rely on much more dangerous car travel. So they had to consider how much risk to tolerate, and how to achieve a balance between risk and cost. They were to assess how much security inconvenience American passengers might tolerate, how deeply security measures could invade privacy and personal freedom, and whether the cost-benefit ratio made h eightened security worthwhile for airports and airlines. Yet they understood that much of their debate would be academic. The airlines had no intention of coughing up the money for a Sisyphean effort to make airports 100 percent secure. When – if – such a huge project would be launched, the government should pay for it, they contended. The advisory commission would be their vehicle for making sure the FAA understood this, and that it sympathized. FAA security experts reciprocated with analyses that clearly showed the amount of money spent guarding against bombs and hijackers far outstripped the value of a plane or two and even, somehow, the hundred or few hundred lives that might be lost in a bombing.

They knew this to be true (and the airlines agreed), even considering reports from the FBI Bomb Data Center that bombing attempts had skyrocketed from 803 in 1984 to 3,163 in 1994, and the findings of the Inspector General and the General Accounting Office that most big international airports in the U.S. were not only poorly secured, they were in fact sieves. Even the recent, vivid and devastating images of Pan Am flight 103, blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, did not sway anyone. On the contrary, the Lockerbie trauma provided a good supporting argument for the commission. Pan Am flight 103 was rare, unusual, perhaps never to be repeated. Enhanced airport security was certain to be an even costlier ongoing burden. So – no contest.

As usual with government committees, it took the advisory commission months to get its act together. The members organized quietly, away from the public eye, attracting little attention, in no real hurry. Airports continued to operate; passengers continued to check baggage they vaguely believed would be sent down a conveyor belt to a secure cargo area where surely it would be screened. They queued up at airport metal detectors, certain that suspicious items would be flagged by conscientious, well-trained security monitors. But when the advisory panel finally met, fate conspired against them. They gathered on July 17, 1996. That evening, TWA flight 800 blew up.

Within hours the White House stepped into the security fray and snatched the debate away from the sluggish influence of the Congress, the FAA and the airlines. Suddenly the advisory members had to scramble to catch a Vice President's commission with a forty-five-day turnaround. It was an election year, after all. Within weeks the commission announced a plan for bomb-detecting equipment, baggage matching and sophisticated computer profiling of passengers. But why did it take presidential pressure? The FAA always had the authority to order those measures.

The crisis was not entirely new to the FAA, however. In fact, the agency accepted these flare-ups as the inevitable cost of doing business. Time to pay the piper, or so, the public thought. Most years, the FAA sailed along without serious sacrifices over new regulations either in money or in its relations with the aviation industry. But every now and then a tragedy happened that forced the FAA to abandon its loyalties and answer to public opinion – if only for a while.

In the fall of 1996, just weeks before the 104th Congress was due to adjourn for the election season and the winter holidays, the House and the Senate scrambled to pass a number of important pieces of legislation still on their tables. One of those was the FAA's budget reauthorization. Congress had to pass it, because otherwise the FAA would be out of money and out of business. Yet the horror of ValuJet flight 592 and TWA flight 800 was still very much on everyone's minds. All summer the pressure had been relentless from the National Transportation Safety Board, pilots' and flight attendants' union representatives, grieving relatives on television and me complaining about the FAA and safety. So tucked into the FAA budget bill was language rewriting the FAA's mandate. Section 401 was called "Elimination of Dual Mandate." The lawmakers inserted a first paragraph into the law that charged the FAA with "assigning, maintaining and enhancing safety and security as the highest priorities in air commerce." They changed "promoting, encouraging" the aviation industry to just plain "encouraging," and where the act had said the FAA should promote "air commerce," they inserted the words "safety of."

The FAA is now ordered to "encourage the safety of air commerce in addition to the development of civil aeronautics."

After I resigned, I tried to get one final piece of information out of the FAA that had been used for years to justify inaction: the monetary value of human life.

"I know very well what you mean," an FAA public affairs official said in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, "but I don't think you're going to get that from us.

"Do you expect anybody here to say what is the value we give to human life and then sign off on it and be left open to ridicule for the rest of our lives?" The question angered the official, and the Freedom of Information Act request was denied. The Death on the High Seas Act limits the liability of a manufacturer to the value of the lost wages of the passengers.

The truth is, no one needs government officials to put a dollar value on his or her life, or on the lives of loved ones. We consider ourselves priceless. So should the FAA.

CHAPTER 15 -- AIRPORTS

AIRPORT SECURITY

Sadly, in the 1990s, the terrorism that has plagued Europe and the Middle East for decades arrived in the U.S. This grim reality most dramatically hit Americans with the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Later, bombs went off at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Oklahoma City federal building. In this atmosphere, it became even more critical that airports and aircraft, the high-profile targets-of-choice for terrorists, had thorough, efficient and proactive security systems and procedures. As discussed earlier, in 1993 and 1995, the Office of Inspector General and the Federal Aviation Administration took a close look at airport security around the country. All airports are equipped with metal detectors to stop gun-toting or knife-wielding passengers. But in many places, the operators behind the x-ray machines and other security personnel proved inept at their jobs. Often they were hired with no background checks, and started work with minimal training. In Washington, D.C., officials tried background checks – but only if an applicant had a year's gap in his employment history, and only for certain offenses, such as rape. A record of theft did not count. Even after the Pan Am flight 103 bombing, the FAA did nothing to force airports and airlines to improve security. As late as November 1996, the NBC television show Dateline sent reporters to Kennedy International Airport in New York to pose as job seekers. The reporters were hired on the spot with no background checks. After Dateline revealed what had happened, the FAA announced they had made such subterfuge illegal – why censure your own people when you can focus on the misdeeds of a television crew instead?

The FAA's scramble to force smarter hiring policies hasn't helped other critical aspects of aviation security. As of 1998, U.S. airlines were not required by any law to x-ray passenger baggage. The 1990 Aviation Security Improvement Act called for automatic screening, but many airports and airlines balked at the extra costs involved. Most do not scan luggage, and when they do, it is a random activity. Many commuter airlines do not have x-ray equipment at all, even for passengers who are checking luggage through to an international flight. Uninspected bags can be transferred to a plane bound for Europe that is carrying passengers whose bags may have been screened in a random test – and who certainly think that the entire cargo loaded onto their plane has been examined. Think again.

Before the 1990 Act, teams of bomb-sniffing dogs were thought to be one answer to security. But the dogs got lost in the shuffle: the aviation industry decided it did not want to spend money to buy, train and keep the animals if sensitive, million-dollar bomb-detecting machines were just around the corner. Of course, the machines never made it to the vast majority of airports – and the dogs didn't either. Pan Am once claimed to have teams of bomb-sniffing dogs, but those turned out to be regular pooches recruited from a dog kennel. The FAA has no bomb-dog program – all it has is a fund that doles out money to local authorities whose canine police units are interested in bomb training for their dogs. It was those units that were reported to have contaminated every plane in America by training their animals with the kind of plastic-explosives residue found on TWA flight 800.

Regardless of the eventual ruling on the cause as mechanical, the TWA flight 800 crash galvanized politicians and aviation industry leaders to call for improved security equipment and passenger-screening methods at U.S. airports. While those ideas were good, it may be years before, they become standard operating procedure. Some of best bomb-screening machines cost $1 million apiece. Just three are in place in the U.S. – two in Atlanta and one San Francisco – even though Congress ordered the FAA to get them up and running years ago and the White House Commission echoed that plea.

In the meantime, all the metal detectors and bomb detectors in the world are useless if a criminal can simply circumvent the screening point and get directly into the "sterile areas" where security is supposedly enforced in airports. My employees tested this. In a 1993 investigation, they slipped through 75 percent of the time. In 1996, plain-clothes inspectors got through 40 percent of the time. Undoubtedly there was improvement, but it offered small comfort. Passengers are relying on airports and airlines to protect them with the kinds of methods that my agents easily thwarted. By the way, even though the FAA tried to keep this kind of information from the public when my office was releasing its security report in January 1996, the FAA sent this information to airlines across the country and admitted that it was available to the public and subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Right now, the nineteen major airports in the U.S. using metal detectors to catch explosives. They're not very good at it:

Fortunately, when metal detectors are used to find metal – guns, knives, grenades, bombs with metal – they do much better.

PROFILING

Profiling has been much discussed in the decade since Pan Am flight 103. Profiling – the art of evaluating a passenger as a security threat based on his appearance, actions, language or personal history – is a substitute for 100 percent passenger and bag check. Were an airline to screen all passengers and their bags with reliable metal weapons and explosives detectors, profiling would nearly superfluous. But since this is impossible – the equipment does not yet exist and the time required for 100 percent screening horrifies the airlines – profiling was instituted to help the airlines figure out whose bags to check.

In some countries, airlines carry out 100 percent bag matching. When people are boarding a domestic Alitalia flight in Italy, luggage is lined up on the tarmac, and passengers walk to the plane, they stop and identify bags for handlers, who then load the luggage on the plane. The system is not very elaborate, but it works. It doesn't identify passengers duped into carrying explosives, or suicide bombers, however.

Since the U.S. passenger load is so great (and we don't want passengers running around the tarmac) we had to come up with other systems, and since the U.S. airlines have complained that a 100 percent bag screen and match is impossible, we have profiling to tell us which few bags should be checked. But this procedure is weak. Would a terrorist really answer "yes" when asked if someone else packed his bag or asked him to carry something on board?

In this country, our courts also have something to say about profiling. In other countries race, nationality, color of skin, sex, religious affiliation or even the possession of facial hair may peg a person as suspect. Here, profiling on many such characteristics is not allowed – the Constitution and the courts protect Americans against this kind of stereotyping. The success of profiling with limited parameters is unproven. So profiling will never be the answer in this country.

In 1997, the White House Aviation Commission envisioned a computer profiling system that would use information fed into the computer to tell the airline which bags to check. That system crashed just minutes into its first test run. They are going to try again in 1998.

It's probably only a matter of time before the security practices used on international flights originating in the U.S. are adopted on domestic flights as well. I hope it does not come about because of a senseless and horrible act of domestic terrorism, but with seventy attempts on domestic U.S. aviation in the first half of 1997, the future does not look good. Eventually we will have more, if not 100 percent, screening of checked luggage, closer examination of carry-on bags, increased questioning of passengers before they board a plane and limits on cargo on passenger flights. Polls have shown that travelers would gladly pay a $10-per-ticket surcharge for security.

© 1997, 1998 by Mary Schiavo

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