What are you willing to give up to make air travel safer? An additional $50 a ticket? $200? An extra half-hour spent undergoing security checks at the airport, or twice that? More important still, how many of us--complacent in the knowledge of American technological superiority, shielded here from foreign terrorism for decades--even realize how perilous the state of airport and airplane security is? For years safety measures, many of which are now standard elsewhere in the world, have languished here--victims of cost-benefit analysis, competing business interests and glacial government bureaucracy.
The modern era of air terrorism--and antiterrorist technology--began on Dec. 21, 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blasted out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, brought down by 14 oz. of plastic explosives packed into a radio-cassette recorder in a piece of luggage. At least the modern era was supposed to have begun then. Subsequent investigations revealed deep fissures in U.S. airline-security systems. The crash also elicited heartfelt promises, in the form of the 1990 Aviation Security Improvement Act, to ensure that the tragedy would not be repeated.
The reality, though, is that as terrorists have progressed, creating schemes of ever greater sophistication, deviousness and danger, U.S. airports have remained mired in the past, with preventive measures--such as metal detectors--that were developed in the 1970s. Those worked well for the problem of that era--hijacking--but do little to combat the threats posed by plastique or suicide bombers. "Our security system is not a model that one would hold up with any pride," says Billie Vincent, who was head of FAA security from 1982 to 1986 and now runs a consulting firm.
Among other measures, the 1990 legislation required the FAA to speed up explosives-detection research, to heighten security checks on airport personnel and to release passenger manifests within three hours of a crash. The deadline set by Congress: November 1993. The FAA failed to adhere to that timetable, blaming Congress for setting overly stringent standards and requiring complicated tests of the new technologies. But that same year--five full years after Lockerbie--the inspector general's office of the Department of Transportation released a report blasting the FAA's overall security program. It is the only such report that has been made public, and it makes for sobering reading.
The report states baldly that airport security was still "seriously flawed" and "not adequate" at the nation's riskiest airports, which include New York City's John F. Kennedy. While the FAA had rated the four airports visited by its inspectors as "good to very good," undercover agents from the inspector general's office reached dramatically different conclusions. In 15 out of 20 attempts to gain entry to supposedly secure areas, agents had little trouble: they got into aircraft-parking areas, baggage areas, and one agent managed to slip an unarmed hand grenade through a metal detector.