Tighter Screening Set for LAX Security Areas

A stopgap validation system aimed at preventing unauthorized personnel--particularly former employees--from entering restricted areas at Los Angeles International Airport will be operating by the end of next week, officials said Tuesday.

The new system, involving the attachment of a special sticker to current airport employee badges, was ordered in the wake of last month’s crash of a Pacific Southwest Airlines jet after a former USAir employee smuggled a gun aboard at LAX without passing through normal metal-detection devices.

Officials believe that David A. Burke later shot a number of people, including the jet’s pilots, causing the crash that killed all 43 aboard.

Badges Unaccounted For

Since the crash, attention has focused on how secure airport facilities are to unauthorized intrusion. A week after the tragedy, the federal General Accounting Office reported that LAX officials are unable to account for more than 6,000 security badges issued to airline and airport employees. Airport officials have placed the number at less than half that total.

Donald Miller, deputy executive director of the city Airport Department, told a City Council committee on Tuesday that the sticker program, beginning Jan. 16, will be replaced in April by a $500,000 computerized identification system. The system, being developed by EDICON, a division of Eastman Kodak, would require current airport employees to use a magnetized identification card to gain access to restricted airport areas.

Miller said the EDICON computer system will include the names as well as photographs of all currently authorized airport employees, including those who work in airport shops and restaurants. When the identification card is inserted into machines at specially located and staffed screening areas, both the name and photo image will appear on the screen.

Under questioning by City Council members, Miller conceded that both the interim and computer programs contain potential loopholes but that the changes represent improvements over present security practices.

Effort to Be Made

In the badge-sticker program, Miller said, the stickers will be distributed only once before the computer system goes into operation. Conceivably, an employee who fails to surrender his badge upon termination might still be able to bypass normal security checks, Miller said. But he said a special effort will be made to collect identification badges from former employees.

Miller said that because of the potential weakness of the sticker system, officials had not planned to use it. But they reconsidered after the PSA incident and out of concern over the unaccounted-for badges, he said.

With the computer program, the main weakness will be possible human error, Miller said. Unless officials make certain that the computer is regularly updated and that departing employees surrender their identification cards, there is no assurance that former workers could not slip into restricted areas, Miller said. He proposed that such safeguards be made mandatory.