How Safe Can We Get?

Jus

t how does a plane become a guided missile? The answer, in part, is that the air-security system in the U.S. is porous in so many ways that a breach was not surprising--only the incomprehensible dimension of it. For aviation experts, who are all too familiar with the gaping holes in the nation's vast network of 100 large airports, there was a sad, easy explanation for Sept. 11: you get what you pay for.

For years, countless critics, from government watchdogs and consumer groups to industry officials, have railed against and exposed the nation's lax, inadequate airline-safety net, one they say has broken down in every aspect: policy, personnel, technology and oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration and Congress. After years of foot dragging, only recently has the FAA started to put stronger rules into effect, requiring more stringent employee background checks and training as well as mandating that all checked baggage be scanned by sophisticated bomb-screening devices--by 2014. Two weeks before the tragedy, a veteran pilot told TIME: "It's absurd to think we're safe."

Few of the nation's 670 million annual passengers would be that foolish any longer. On the contrary, the challenge now will be to convince flyers that the skies won't be dangerous. After a two-day shutdown, American air space reopened tentatively last Thursday, under a list of strict new rules that many experts have been demanding for more than a decade: banning curbside check-in or parking, forbidding family and friends to accompany passengers to the gate, having security personnel check all planes before passengers board, conducting random searches of flight crews and equipment, and prohibiting the transport of cargo or mail on passenger jets.

Most notably, in light of the primitive weapons used by the hijackers, passengers will be prohibited from carrying on any kind of knives or cutting devices--metal or plastic, utility, razor blades or box cutters, no matter how small--a ban already in place in countries such as Japan and Pakistan.

The FAA is contemplating increasing the use of armed, undercover air marshals on domestic flights, an action that nearly 80% of Americans support, according to a TIME/CNN poll conducted last week. Now fewer than 100 federal air marshals randomly travel on a very select number of domestic and international routes, down from a peak of more than 1,000 in the early 1970s, before concerns about airborne shoot-outs effectively sank the program. Some pilots are suggesting that an even better deterrent would be to have a uniformed security officer in the jump seat next to the cockpit.

By the end of the week, Americans were learning that "inconvenience is the price to pay for security," as Alan Taylor, a field engineer for an elevator company, said at Los Angeles airport on Friday. With bomb-sniffing dogs roaming the terminals, airline personnel asking pointed questions and armed guards holding machine guns, taking off will invariably take a lot longer. "If they don't open this bag and probe it, I'll be worried," said a traveler, Paul Pereda, an electrician from Woodbridge, Va.

Don't take too much comfort from these new measures. They won't necessarily fix what an industry expert calls the "dirty little secret of aviation." At its root is an inherent conflict of interest: profit-driven airlines are largely responsible for screening passengers. The more money and time they spend in that process, the less efficient and profitable they become. It's not that they strive to be lax, but security isn't their business. Last Thursday a Northwest Airlines flight crew in Phoenix, Ariz., deliberately got through security carrying a pocketknife and corkscrew, just to show how weak the system remains.

"We can promulgate all the regulations that the Secretary of Transportation wants, but the problem is who enforces them," says Charles Slepian, a New York-based attorney and outspoken critic of the FAA. "You cannot declare war against terrorists and then ask Continental Airlines to fight the battle for you."

Many believe that the government or a quasi-government airport authority, as in most foreign countries, from France to India, should take over responsibility for security--and fund it through taxes or surcharges. That way, the argument goes, the U.S. could have a standardized, coordinated professional law-enforcement approach to security, immune to the bottom lines of publicly traded companies.

"Airport-security chiefs agree something needs to be done about preboard screening," says Tom Shehan, chief of police at Dallas/Fort Worth airport. "Either privatize it, make it strictly government-run or under airport control. Just not the airlines." In the past, it was assumed that neither the government nor industry wanted to make this change. But the Air Transport Association has met with the FAA and Department of Transportation to argue that federalizing airport security may be the only answer. "This was an attack on national security, and that inherently is a government function," says Mike Wascom, spokesman for the A.T.A. The public agrees, according to the new TIME/CNN poll.