The goal is simple to state, if maddeningly difficult to implement: limit access to planes, and scrutinize everybody and everything that goes onto them. While many point to Israel’s El Al Airlines as the gold standard of aviation security–with its legendary grilling of every passenger, for example–it operates just dozens of flights a day. To copy its vaunted system would cost billions of dollars in new equipment and bring the U.S. system to a near halt. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the airlines are nevertheless making progress. Most airlines have finished reinforcing their cockpit doors. Alaska Airlines and JetBlue have even retrofitted their planes with bulletproof, Kevlar-reinforced doors. The FAA now prohibits all knives, corkscrews, metal nail files and other items that might be used as weapons. It has ordered airlines to use computer-assisted passenger screening to pick out more travelers for closer scrutiny, to assign air marshals to more flights and to check more baggage using the 140 explosive-detection machines at 47 airports. But while the FAA has called for continuous use of the machines, the agency’s inspector general testified to Congress that during a recent survey some were not even turned on.
That is only one of many gaps between theory and practice. The FAA has ordered airports to revalidate ID badges, as well as conduct criminal-background checks, for about 1 million workers with access to secure areas of terminals. They won’t finish until next summer. In the meantime, ramp access–long identified as a security hole–remains poorly controlled. Investigators chasing leads on possible terrorist cells in Detroit arrested two men with airport- security badges that might have let them through checkpoints unchallenged. The iris scanners used at the Amsterdam airport are more effective than a simple ID badge for keeping impostors out of secure areas, but the FAA has no plans to require them. And while it’s fine to ban nail files, derringers (and probably files) still slip past screeners. Even full implementation of many of the proposed security steps would fall short of stopping a determined terrorist, particularly one willing to die. Matching bags to passengers, as security experts have demanded for years, would not stop a suicidal terrorist. “As clever as we get, there’s always some diabolically clever person out there who could find a chink in the system,” says Richard Gritta of the University of Portland, who specializes in aviation security.
The White House has apparently reached the same conclusion. U.S. fighter jets now conduct combat air patrols 24/7 over major metropolitan areas. AWACS and other surveillance aircraft, whose “lookdown radar” can see clear to the ground, also patrol the nation’s airspace. And the White House has given the North Amer-ican Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) authority to order the fighters to inspect, intercept and confront suspicious planes.
FIRST STEPS: Train and supervise screeners. Inspect all bags for explosives. Check all passengers against criminal and terrorist databases. Consider technologies that would, in the event of an onboard attack, automatically land the plane safely at the nearest airport.
