There are two telling specifics. The first is contained in two reports from the office of the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, the FAA’s parent agency. In 1993 and again in 1995, undercover teams sent out by former IG Mary Schiavo successfully penetrated supposedly secure areas in a number of major U.S. airports. The ““audit teams’’ carried no proper ID and, according to sources, managed to get past guard posts in some cases simply by mingling with airport workers. According to the 1993 report, the IG’s infiltrators got into secure areas in 15 out of 20 attempts, and in one case (the airport is not identified) a team member carried a deactivated hand grenade right through a metal detector. The obvious conclusion is that a bomber bent on planting a device on a plane would have a fair chance of doing so. Schiavo’s 1995 follow-up report found that airport security hadn’t improved much since 1993. But shortly after her recent resignation, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Department of Transportation classified her new report on grounds of national security.
The second specific is the FAA’s continuing failure to meet a congressional timetable for installing high-tech bomb detectors in U.S. airports. This goal was a direct response to the bombing of Pan Am 103, which showed the changing nature of the terrorist threat. Before Lockerbie, U.S. security measures were essentially aimed at deterring hijackers who tried to board a plane armed with guns. The countermeasures, which were largely successful, consisted of screening passengers and their luggage with X-ray machines or magnetometers, which can detect metal objects like guns and knives. But Pan Am 103 was destroyed by a suitcase bomb made of plastic explosives, which are not easily spotted by X-ray screening and do not register on a magnetometer. In 1990 Congress set a November 1993 goal for the FAA to develop new technologies for detecting such ““plastique’’ bombs and to install these high-tech scanners in airports.
The years went by, and nothing happened. In May 1994 the General Accounting Office reported that the FAA was making ““little progress’’ toward the congressionally mandated goal. Finally the FAA approved a device known as the CTX5000, which is made by a Foster City, Calif., company called Invision Technologies. The CTX5000, which works like a CT scanner, is good enough to detect even tiny amounts of plastic explosive – but it costs about $1 million, and price is a major problem. ““The airlines don’t want to do it, and the FAA won’t force them,’’ says David Pillor of Invision. The FAA, still searching for cheaper technologies, has installed three Invision scanners, one in San Francisco and two at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. ““We’ve got stuff that’s out there and working,’’ said FAA spokesman Eliot Brenner. ““Are we ever going to get a break?’’ But there is no such device at New York’s JFK International Airport – and as a result almost no chance that anyone could have found a plastic bomb, if there was one, aboard TWA Flight 800.
Improving security is no mystery: the FAA and every other civil-aviation agency in the world knows how it can be done. It just takes time, money and the determination to do it. The political will must come from Congress. The money must come from the taxpayers and the flying public, in the form of higher fares or taxes. And the time – frustrating delays of up to two hours while every single piece of luggage is checked – must come from the customers as well, which means that millions of American travelers would have to accept much greater inconvenience in exchange for peace of mind. The FAA, meanwhile, must also find ways to overcome the public’s fears that air safety is on the decline, as the ValuJet crash in May and a terrifying engine explosion aboard a Delta Air Lines jet in Pensacola, Fla., last month seemed to suggest.
Sooner or later, when the facts are in and the mourning has abated, the fireball that destroyed Flight 800 is likely to scorch the FAA. That is either fair or unfair, depending on your perspective – but it is probably inevitable, given the fact that the agency has a monumentally difficult task, huge internal problems and, on the whole, an indifferent track record. By law, the FAA has long had a dual and arguably contradictory mission – to promote the interests of U.S. commercial aviation and regulate the industry at the same time. Now the Clinton administration is asking Congress to rewrite the law to allow the agency to concentrate exclusively on safety. While it is perfectly true that commercial aviation is a lot safer than all other forms of mass transportation, statistics aren’t particularly comforting in the aftermath of a high-profile disaster like TWA 800.
The FAA, in short, is an easy target for second-guessing – and a strong candidate for fundamental reform. The agency’s problems aren’t just the security concerns raised by Flight 800. It’s still, for example, under fire for its erratic performance both before and after the May 11 ValuJet disaster in the Florida Everglades. ValuJet is probably the clearest example yet of a charge the FAA’s critics have been making for years, which is that the agency is too cozy with the airlines and the industry it regulates.
The agency’s defenders like to point out that it has successfully managed crisis and revolutionary change in the aviation business. The biggest of these is airline deregulation, which over the past 20 years has turned commercial aviation from a government-sponsored cartel into a thriving and intensely competitive industry. Another is the air-traffic controllers’ 1981 strike, which could have destroyed the FAA and crippled the industry but did neither. Along the way, the agency has supervised the advent of bigger and bigger passenger jets, the extension of scheduled air service to more and more U.S. cities and a huge expansion in the number of Americans who fly and the number of air miles they travel – all of this, the agency says, without any decrease in safety. At the same time, however, the FAA has been damaged by successive scandals that have led to calls for major reform. Among them:
ATC stands for air-traffic control, one of the FAA’s primary missions. But it could just as easily stand for ““appalling technological confusion,’’ because the agency, hoping to solve its endemic labor problems, has squandered millions trying to make human air-traffic controllers nearly obsolete. The dream of a fully automated ATC system may be beyond the state of the programmer’s art, and the Clinton administration has finally scaled back the plan. Meanwhile, many FAA centers are equipped with ancient computers that are prone to breakdowns, and a much-heralded Doppler radar system intended to detect wind-shear conditions is still not installed at most airports despite years of development. How bad is the equipment? At some FAA centers, air-to-ground communications depend on radios that went out of production years ago – and on vacuum tubes that have to be imported from Eastern Europe.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the FAA fell under the spell of a California psychologist named Gregory May, who ran ““sensitivity’’ sessions for agency managers. The sessions allegedly included cultlike brainwashing techniques that some participants found offensive, and an investigation by IG Mary Schiavo’s office found that many FAA employees thought May had veto power over promotions to top FAA jobs. Schiavo’s investigators also found that May was a follower of a New Age guru named J. Z. Knight, who claimed to ““channel’’ the spirit of a 35,000-year-old warrior named Ramtha. May’s FAA contract was terminated before the IG’s report became public last year, and he recently pleaded guilty to mail fraud as a result of the investigation. But insiders say some top FAA executives who went along with May’s training practices are still in their jobs, and some of them may yet face disciplinary action.
The May 11 crash is arguably the most embarrassing event in the recent history of the FAA – a disaster that has already prompted the early retirement of the agency’s top safety official, Anthony Broderick, and humiliated both FAA Administrator David Hinson and Transportation Secretary Federico Pea. Broderick, backed by Hinson and Pea, said the Everglades crash had not been caused by ““systematic’’ problems with the airline. But the subsequent discovery that ValuJet was not properly supervising its maintenance contractors forced the FAA to ground the airline. The controversy has now led to a widening recognition that the FAA’s traditional regulatory style, which relies heavily on the honesty and common sense of pilots and airline executives, may not be tough enough to maintain safety. Questions are now being raised about ValuJet’s political influence. NEWSWEEK has learned that on two occasions last winter a lobbyist for the airline contacted a friend who worked for Pea and succeeded in sidetracking a demand by a senior Clinton budget adviser that the transportation department review ValuJet’s license to fly. Pea’s office denied any impropriety.
Congress has begun work on legislation to eliminate the FAA’s dual mission and let the agency focus on safety alone. But even that change may not be enough. As agency insiders know, the FAA is also bound by law to balance the cost of safety requirements against their benefits to the flying public. Cost-benefit analysis is all the rage in Congress. But it leads, inevitably, to policies like the FAA’s go-slow approach to deploying million-dollar gizmos like the CTX5000, which might have saved 230 lives if it had been operating at JFK last week. The ultimate meaning is clear: the public must decide how much it wants to spend to make the skies safer.
Airport is accessible only at one or two points which can be easily monitored. Terminal is lined with concrete barricades to prevent a car bomb.
Passengers present a photo ID an are questioned about their baggage. A bar code is attached to each bag and entered into a computer system; the passenger’s baggage-claim ticket is also coded. As bags are loaded, they are X-rayed or searched.
People going to the gate send handheld possessions through a high-tech “bomb sniffer” like the CTX5000 that can detect plastic explosives as well as standard explosives.
SECURITY PERSONNEL: Many are poorly paid, poorly trained and poorly educated. They need regular refresher courses, better background checks and tight on-the-job supervision.
Passengers present baggage slips and photo ID. Flight attendants use computers to make sure all bags belong to passengers.
SERVICE PERSONNEL: They are often not airline employees, but outsourced labor. They should all be subject to thorough background checks and restricted from freely wandering around aircraft.
171 DEAD: A French DC-10 crashed in the Sahara, the victim of a Libyan bomb.
270 DEAD: Libyan terrorists bring down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
329 DEAD: Sikh extremists blew up an Air India 747 off the Irish coast.
