In Face of Fear, Will Higher Costs and More Hassles Fly?

New York businessman Steve Mason flies 150,000 miles a year. Even if he is working on a Saturday, he wears a fresh white shirt with a tightly knotted tie. And in the wake of the destruction of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, he would accept higher ticket costs and greater inconvenience cheerfully if that is the price of better security in the skies.

“I can get irritated by [the inconveniences], like I can get irritated having to wear a suit and tie on a Saturday,” he said, “but it’s just something you have to do. I can get up a little bit earlier in the morning and I can get home a little later if that’s what I have to do to go and get back from where I have to go.”

Greg Holroyd of Charlotte, N.C., a commercial furniture company executive and regular air traveler, is both in favor of greater security for airlines and skeptical about the result. “No one wants to blow up in an airplane. Air travel in general is far behind the times from a technical standpoint. I think probably there needs to be a face-lift, and that goes for security also.

“But I don’t know how they would keep it foolproof,” he added. “I don’t know if there’s enough money in the world to do that.”

Such sentiments are among the first stirrings of what is likely to become a major national debate in the weeks and months ahead.

In airport lounges and family living rooms across the country, as well as in the halls of Congress, the horrifying and thus far unexplained destruction of Flight 800 has focused attention on the vulnerability of America’s commercial airliners to terrorist attack. Designed originally to stop armed hijackers at the boarding gate, the present system is considered vulnerable to terrorism, especially the planting of explosives in baggage and cargo.

And the time is long past, security experts are almost unanimous in saying, when the United States can feel secure at home.

“The intelligence community believes that the threat of terrorism within the United States has increased,” the General Accounting Office told Congress in a report last March, and “experts believe that aviation is likely to remain an attractive target for terrorists.”

Whatever the cause of Wednesday’s tragedy, U.S. carriers are vulnerable, critics of the present system say, and the nation must move toward the approach used by countries with better security: Give a far higher priority to blocking terrorism and a far larger role to the federal government to get the job done.

If the Flight 800 explosion is determined to be a terrorist attack, said William Baker, the former senior FBI official who led the investigation of the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, “then I think we’re going to have to readdress the issue and spend the time, effort and dollars to improve all facets of aviation security.”

In the present global economy, Baker said, people must fly, and “we’ve got to do something to assure people that it’s a safer bet.” Given the heavy economic costs of improved safety, he added, “perhaps it should be more of a government function” or the added costs should be passed through to passengers.

Yet such views collide with the free-market economic principles embodied in more than 20 years of reduced government involvement in the airline industry--as well as the lower fares and wider use of air travel that deregulation brought with it.

In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president with his philosophy of smaller government and deregulation, U.S. airlines carried 225 million passengers. In 1996, the total will pass 560 million, and some forecasters said that it will top 1 billion a year by 2005.

The rising tide of air travel flows from increasing competition within the airline industry, however, and many carriers are operating close to the line financially. All face constant pressure to trim costs while increasing customer satisfaction.

How can they absorb the millions of dollars in more advanced equipment and better-trained security personnel required for greater protection against terrorism? How will their customers, especially the business travelers and corporations that underwrite a huge share of the market, respond to the higher prices and delays that are almost certain to come with tighter security?

The answers to those and related questions will begin to emerge, perhaps as early as later this month, when Congress takes up the issue of tighter security.

Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees commercial aviation, said Saturday that Congress may impose a 5% surcharge on airline tickets to pay for added security measures. His committee probably will conduct hearings early in August, he said, not to discuss whether increased security measures will be installed but how and when it will be done.

“There will be more background checks on all contractors, plus X-raying all baggage” and passenger searches, among other things, he said. “It will be a costly, tedious process. . . . It’s going to be less convenient for the traveling public, and there are going to be more lines and more irritation, but it’s for safety, and I think people want it.

“There is going to be some action. . . . The medicine is not going to be sweet,” he said.

“Whenever there’s an action of this nature, there is necessarily a reevaluation of all procedures that are employed and what changes need to be made,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the aviation subcommittee of Pressler’s panel, said Saturday. “After people die, changes are made.”

McCain noted the tension between higher security and airline economics. The more convenient an airline is for travelers, the more money it will make, he said. “You’ve almost got this contradictory situation: rapid service but, on the other hand, make sure people are safe.”

“It will be a series of trade-offs between passenger convenience and the use of the airlines,” he said. And the extra cost? “That will be born by the passengers.”

Jeff Nelligan, a spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which deals with aviation security, said that hearings by the House committee will focus on whether the federal government, the nation’s airports or the airlines should take primary responsibility for increasing security.

One thing is certain, he said: “Safety and security cost money.”

They will also cost passengers a lot of time, he said. “There are 2.3 million pieces of baggage [processed] on a daily basis through airports. Do we slow down baggage checks for the sake of security?”

Perhaps, but adding to the aggravation of air travelers and raising their ticket prices is not how the game is being played now. Changing it will not be easy.

“We want to have a safe, reliable system,” said Louis C. Cancelmi, a spokesman for Alaska Airlines. “When it comes to it, ultimately, if you want a safe and reliable system, you have to pay for it. Will people be willing to pay it, and will people be willing to wait? We’ll see.”

Like other airlines, Alaska Airlines has concentrated on cutting costs, and services, to stay competitive.

“Now we have meals at mealtime,” Cancelmi said. “In the past, at Alaska Airlines, you would have a hot meal at any time of the day.” Now, at times when the airline had served meals, “we’ve gone to snacks, and where we had snacks, we’ve gone to beverage service. We do not do the free wine and other things.”

Beginning four years ago, the company also cut 500 management jobs and increased the use of its 75-plane fleet--from eight hours a day to 11.4 hours, creating the equivalent of 25 additional planes. Last week, the airline announced a second-quarter profit of $18 million, with revenues totaling $462 million.

Such profit margins would dwindle with added costs for new equipment capable of detecting today’s plastic explosives in air cargo. Such costs are estimated at $400 million to $2.2 billion, depending on how many airports are covered and how comprehensive the systems are.

Acting on a congressional mandate laid down after the Lockerbie disaster, which claimed the lives of all 259 people aboard and 11 more on the ground, the FAA has overseen the development and testing of the necessary new equipment. It is now getting trial runs in Atlanta and San Francisco, with apparently favorable results.

But the process has been slow, and the FAA has been ever mindful of the cost of ordering the airline industry to undertake massive new capital outlays.

That caution is likely to continue. The record suggests that even the public reaction to a dreadful event like Wednesday’s tragedy is no guarantee of quick action.

In response to a wave of devastating bombings in the 1980s, a consensus developed that manufacturers should add chemical markers to plastic explosives to aid in their detection. In 1991, 50 nations gave preliminary approval to the Convention on Marking of Plastic Explosives. The pact, once ratified, would require all manufacturers to add substances to the explosive compound that would give off a telltale vapor and aid in detection. The pact also would pledge signatories to import or export only those explosives containing the markers.

The Czech Republic, which during the communist era provided a plastic explosive called Semtex to extremist groups around the world, was the first to ratify the convention. Semtex is believed responsible for the Lockerbie explosion. But the United States, despite its aggressive posture of opposing terrorism worldwide, ratified the pact only this year, five years after the original agreement. At that, only 21 countries have ratified it, according to senior U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

Times staff writers Sam Fulwood III and Robin Wright contributed to this story.