How Safe Can We Get?

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The penny pinching, say critics, leads to shortchanging security: some firms never check job applicants for color blindness, even though high-tech screening equipment often uses color monitors to highlight suspicious shapes. Only last October, Argenbright, which is in charge of security at Dulles International Airport near Washington and at Logan, was fined about $1.5 million and pleaded guilty to allowing untrained employees, some with criminal backgrounds (including drug dealing and assault), to staff checkpoints at the airport in Philadelphia from 1995 to 1998.

An Argenbright executive defends the company's overall performance, noting that it processed more than 350 million passengers last year and confiscated more than 4,200 contraband items. As for the knives used on the Boston flights, "it appears that all the items used by the hijackers were permitted under FAA regulations," says Bill Barbour, president of Argenbright, which provides security for more than 40 U.S. airports, including 17 of the nation's busiest.

Given how thankless and tedious the security jobs are, ex-cons might be the only ones applying. Many screeners make little more than minimum wage, often without even the meager benefits that airport janitors get, while their counterparts in European countries earn two to three times that and--surprise, surprise--stay on much longer. With at most a high school diploma and sometimes not speaking fluent English, these crucial gatekeepers often have to work an additional job or two just to pay the rent, and they arrive for duty exhausted.

It's no surprise, then, that after only a few months at work, screeners are more than ready to move on. At Logan, for instance, the annual turnover rate from May 1998 to April 1999 was 207%, and Dulles had a slightly more respectable 90%, according to a study by the GAO. St. Louis airport was the worst, with a staggering 416% turnover rate, meaning that the entire screening staff changed every three months.

So what else, outside of a complete government takeover, can be done to improve security? At the simplest level, many experts recommend requiring all passengers to make a positive identification of their luggage before boarding and not allowing any other bags on the plane--a practice that has been standard in most of the rest of the world since the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie. U.S. carriers have consistently griped that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to introduce passenger-bag matching. The FAA is now reconsidering it.

In the past year, the agency, and not just the airlines, has gained certification authority over private security contractors, which, theoretically at least, should help weed out the worst performers. The FAA's new background-check guidelines may also help, but as usual, they are filled with loopholes. All security workers who started before Dec. 23, 2000, are grandfathered and don't have to be checked against a database for criminal records.

Did accomplices plant knives on the doomed planes? Perhaps not, but there remains the general problem of lost or misplaced identification badges that give workers access to restricted areas. They often end up in the wrong hands. Two were stolen in April, for instance, from the Rome hotel rooms of an American Airlines pilot and flight attendant. Under current guidelines, authorities have to report the disappearance of a badge or reissue all cards only if 5% of the total vanish, which means that at a major airport like Logan, 600 have got to be missing before anything has to be done about it.

Technology, as always, will play a part in improving security. The question, as always, is when and who pays for it? Most of the major U.S. airports have an advanced $1 million CTX scanning machine that can detect explosives. The problem is, these units are not used all that often and are reserved primarily for so-called suspicious bags. In March 2000, DOT Assistant Inspector General Alexis Stefani told a congressional committee that more than half the powerful machines were screening fewer than 225 bags a day, despite the fact that they are capable of scanning that many in just an hour.

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