Make the Skies Safe
Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta was refreshingly blunt in acknowledging that airport security remains so inadequate that people are still slipping guns through checkpoints. Unfortunately, the “zero tolerance” policy he announced was as weak in details as it was strong in rhetoric.
In recent years, the Transportation Department has interpreted its mandate so timidly that it seems a subsidiary of the airlines. Yet the agency’s mission statement gives Mineta ample authority to impose any measure he deems essential to protecting public safety. Now he needs to get cracking to assure a wary public that the skies are safe.
Federalizing airport security workers is crucial. But because a handful of House Republicans are intent on blocking that effort, it’s even more important that Mineta demand airlines fix other glaring problems. He should immediately:
* Require airlines to identify potentially dangerous passengers with the existing computer screening system it has at its disposal, and then go through those peoples’ carry-on and checked luggage with extraordinary thoroughness. Israeli security experts say that the principal flaw of the U.S. system is that it is more focused on locating dangerous objects than on identifying suspicious characters. The computer system corrects this blindness by creating a risk-profile for every customer who buys a ticket, but the system is so poorly coordinated that security workers often never receive the lists they need to know which passengers to question and pat down.
* Require airports to conduct extensive, random screening of all baggage, whether or not it is flagged by the computer system. The Transportation Department recently inspected baggage sorting facilities at several dozen major U.S. airports and found bomb detection machines sitting idle. The machines, the department asserted, are being used at only 10% of capacity.
* All major airports should be required to install new, high-tech scanners that use computer tomography similar to hospital CAT scanners to detect knives, plastic explosives and other dangers that ordinary X-ray scanners miss.
The sooner the new technologies can be installed at airports the better--let the costs be absorbed through a surcharge on those passengers who insist on filling a luggage cart with duffels, suitcases and bulging cardboard boxes every time they travel.
While these moves would help restore public confidence in flying, political game playing by three House majority leaders--Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas)--has been eroding it.
Our hope is that they will get out of the way and that the House will vote today to federalize aviation security, following the Senate, which did so by a 100-0 vote last month.
Mineta, meanwhile, should combine the candor he showed on Tuesday with the clout of his position and demand that the airlines stop dithering and make flying safe.
