Air Travel Has New Look for Holidays; Security Is Tighter, But Holes Remain
Greg Schneider, James V. Grimaldi and Ellen Nakashima
11/18/2001
The Washington Post
FINAL
Page A01
When President Bush signs the new airport security bill tomorrow at Reagan National Airport, thousands of Americans will already 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 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 their jobs have been reduced to little more than make-work spot checks. And airlines frequently 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. It is happening "on my watch," he said. "I know what I'm going to do."
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. "The responsibility really has to go all the way up the line. . . . All of us are part of that mea culpa."
This time, the stakes for change are higher than ever. The terrorist acts of Sept. 11 exposed the flawed security system in the most horrific of ways, and Americans say they want to feel safe or they will not fly. Security is seen as a priority for the survival of the airlines.
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.
Service vs. Secutiry
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.
Just this week, for example, 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 rulemakers 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.
Webster, in an interview, said he resented the idea that he was acting just as an attorney "for hire" by the airlines. He recalled that he told Oberstar then he would have taken the position he did even if he still were FBI director.
"I'm not going to argue what I argued 10 years ago, but times have changed, costs have changed," Webster said yesterday. "I don't think the airlines should be faulted for not wanting to spend money in areas where it was not likely to have benefited."
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; that meant existing workers were not checked and new workers were checked only if they had gaps in their re{acute}sume{acute}s.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) 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.
"It was tougher, it got compromised out, but we did pass a bill and it didn't get killed," Hutchison said. "The airline industry was concerned about the costs, but they didn't kill it. They just toned it down."
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.
Industry officials defended the aggressive lobbying as trying to help the FAA and Congress focus on only those security measures that will most effectively stop terrorist attacks.
They blame the FAA for its slow approach and the federal government for failing to commit enough money and to boost intelligence-gathering that could help catch would-be terrorists.
"You need to focus your resources on threats," said Dick Doubrava, managing director of security for the Air Transport Association, which represents the airlines.
But some transportation officials blame both the airlines and themselves for moving too slowly to enact inadequate rules.
"The rulemaking process is slow and rife with compromise," security consultant Paul E. Busick told the Senate in testimony in September, a month before he unexpectedly was nominated to be the FAA's new security chief. "The industry has taken advantage of their legal rights to question, delay and dilute rules intended to improve aviation security."
Assigning Blame
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.
"FAA does not have a strategy that articulates important milestones, sets realistic expectations and identifies resources to guide efforts for implementing new explosive detection technology," the GAO said.
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. The technology is based on hospital CAT-scan equipment, and reportedly it can detect even scattered components of a bomb in luggage.
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 eXaminer 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 new bomb scanners rolled out last week at BWI are L-3 devices.
The spending-bill provision, approved by Young's committee, justifies Congress's 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.
L-3 detectors tested by the FAA often failed because of software problems, Mead said. And one machine at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport "had problems from the day it was installed" nearly 18 months ago, breaking down about every 84 hours of operation.
The L-3 scanner problems are part of the reason behind the slow deployment and "under-utilization" of technology that could prevent future terrorist bombings of commercial aircraft, the inspector general said. One congressman who supports speeding up the installation of bomb scanners said lawmakers should "quit micro-managing" and "go with the best science."
"We're talking about safety and human life here," Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio). "This doesn't seem justifiable."
Frank C. Lanza, L-3 chief executive, acknowledges that the company has had problems with its scanners, and he says Mead's report was technically "accurate."
"Reliability was less than we wanted, but that reliability has improved very much," Lanza said. "As we deploy more, it will improve even more."
Lanza says deploying the scanners is one of a few steps that would cause an immediate, measurable improvement in aviation safety. But for now, he said, a funding bottleneck has stalled production and left machines stranded in warehouses.
A Dual Mission
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 week, the FAA's parent, the Transportation Departments, 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. "The jobs and the classifications will move over" to the new security agency, he said. "Whether the body automatically moves over, I can't tell you that."
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. "The FAA is the front line of aviation security. We could have forced the carriers to hire, to train better, to get that equipment out there, to do basic good security. . . . But the bottom line is, we didn't. [FAA management] bowed to whatever the air carriers lobbied them to do."
FAA Administrator Garvey was quizzed last week at a Senate hearing about why the agency never insisted on better training for security screeners.
"That's a very fair question and one we've looked at and asked ourselves," she replied.
Dan Boelsche, a former Argenbright Security Inc. supervisor at Dulles International Airport, said he always felt frustrated that the FAA did not require more training and the contracting system did not provide enough manpower or money for greater training.
The FAA required 12 hours of classroom training and 40 hours of on-the-job training for baggage screeners. Boelsche said it should have been more like six weeks of training.
The new legislation requires 40 hours of classroom training and 60 hours on the job.
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.
"I could have used that $6,500 to train them all a little better, and I could have used the agents to help me do it," Boelsche said.
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.
The East Coast FAA agent said local managers often insisted on calling ahead and warning airlines before conducting the checkpoint tests. FAA officials dispute such assertions. Even without the warning, the agent said, screeners almost always recognized the agents and phoned their managers to alert all the other checkpoints.
Many situations came down to the FAA agent's word against that of the carrier or security company. For example, when an agent looked at a busy checkpoint and determined that an extra guard was needed to handle the crowds, the carrier would decline because it was technically meeting minimum requirements and more staffing would cost money.
When a violation was written up, the paperwork took months to percolate through the FAA. The airlines usually challenged the findings, the FAA agent said, and FAA managers often intervened and made disputed violations go away.
"They will send the message down the chain [that] we don't want to have this kind of unfriendly relations with the carrier," said the agent, who has more than a decade of experience.
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.
"I can only account for what has happened since the 25th of January," when he took office, he said in the Friday interview. Asked to answer allegations that the Transportation Department and FAA have been lax on violations, Mineta said, "you've got to recognize that the screening obligation was really up to the airlines."
He acknowledged that fines have sometimes not been high enough. He said he was disappointed when the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia came to an agreement recently with Argenbright over charges that the company had continued to hire screeners with criminal backgrounds, despite an earlier court case and the events of Sept. 11.
"I thought they should have pressed that case to the wall," he said. "But that's not our job."
He added that he thought part of the problem with the fines is that some violations may be "prosecutable . . . but the U.S. attorneys are never interested in doing those things because they're too minor."
He said he has suggested that the Justice Department handle the felony cases, leaving misdemeanors to the Transportation Department. He said he did not know whether the new agency would have that authority.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the panel that negotiated the legislation with the House and a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, acknowledged that "there is a lot of heavy lifting to be done" to overcome past practices and make the new system effective.
The key to doing that, he said, is continued pressure from Capitol Hill. "Congress has to be tenacious about doing oversight and watch-dogging this legislation at every step as this is phased in."
Oberstar, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, and a lead negotiator with the Senate on the bill, warned against complacency setting in.
"Over time, even with a calamitous destructive event that cost billions of dollars to our economy, times get better, people get impatient and lower their guard," he said. "It is up to the executive branch to maintain their vigilance. It is up to the Congress that they do their oversight."
Staff writers Joby Warrick, Sara Kehaulani Goo and Don Phillips and staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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