Bumps in the Sky

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All that gives the TSA a measure of credibility in bragging that flying is safer today. Yet no one with a deep understanding of aviation security thinks we're safe enough. Heatwole was hardly the first guy to pull off an outlandish security breach in recent months. In September a New York City man had himself packed in a crate and shipped to Dallas in the cabin of a cargo plane and remained undetected through four airports. In August at New York City's JFK airport, three fishermen whose raft was caught in choppy waters tied it to a pier, walked onto a runway and wandered around for nearly an hour past jets with people on board before stumbling upon the airport's police headquarters. Local airports and law enforcement bear some responsibility for those breaches. But if they are so easy for amateurs and bumblers, how tough would they be for the criminally minded? The TSA is "very much a work in progress," says Gerald Dillingham, director of civil aviation issues for the General Accounting Office (GAO), Congress's investigative wing. Here's where some of that work is needed.

Smarter Profiling
Security experts say the Achilles' heel of our system is that it focuses more on finding things than on analyzing people or their intent. Loy, who is leaving the TSA FOR THE NO. 2 JOB AT THE Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says his "biggest regret was not being able to get a more sophisticated passenger-screening system in place by now." What he's really saying is that we need better profiling. That word butts against our democratic ideal that we should all be treated equally. But the current system — in which information is collected on things like how you pay for a ticket, how often you fly and whether you're traveling one way — can result in Grandpa getting pulled over for the full wand inspection. It's also why up to 20% of passengers on JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran get sidelined, since those carriers sell a lot of one-way fares.

The TSA and airline industry would love a smarter system. "It's the single most effective security measure we could take," says Tom Walsh, deputy head of the Air Line Pilots Association's security committee. But the TSA's proposal isn't winning many fans. That system would assess passengers' risk levels based on a variety of personal data, including criminal records, and give passengers a green, yellow or red light to fly. Get the green, and you would probably breeze through; get yellow, and you and your belongings would be subjected to closer inspection; get red, and you would be subject to extensive questioning and might be prevented from flying. The TSA says the system would automatically delete your personal data a few days after you fly and that the agency would set up a dispute mechanism for passengers who feel unfairly hassled.

Not surprisingly, the idea sends Big Brother chills down the spines of civil-liberties groups and their allies in Congress. It didn't help that a security contractor used itinerary information provided by JetBlue to dig up passengers' Social Security numbers and credit histories. Airlines say they want a system something like what the TSA proposes. But because it's controversial, their strategy is to wait for the government to ram one through and force them to comply.

Training the Air Cops
A few weeks before Loy's departure was announced, the GAO issued two critical reports, one of which said there are "significant weaknesses in the testing and training procedures for TSA airport screeners." The TSA collects too little information on screeners' performance and doesn't yet have a systematic way of training supervisors, the reports found. The inspector general of the DHS discovered that the screeners had been given test answers in order to maximize the pass rate. A classified section of one of the GAO reports suggests that weapons are still making their way past security. And this summer 1,000 screeners were fired because they failed background checks.

Congress is reviewing the TSA's hiring, monitoring and training of screeners, and the agency says it's making changes. A better training program is being put in place for both screeners and supervisors, and all screeners must now be recertified annually. The TSA says it met its self-imposed Sept. 29 deadline for finishing background checks on screeners, whose fingerprints are now on file with the FBI, and it told TIME that it had to let go of 4% of screeners because they did not pass muster.