Air Safety vs. ‘Flexibility’
The aviation security bill that President Bush signed about two weeks ago was supposed to take effect at jet speed, with its first big requirement--that all checked bags be screened--to start Jan. 18.
The airline industry, scrambling to avoid expense and new passenger delays, wants to retard that deadline. House aviation subcommittee Chairman John L. Mica (R-Fla.), who is holding a hearing today on airport baggage security, echoed the industry’s arguments last week: “The baggage screening provision is not realistic.... [Rules] need to be flexible....” The bill is already flexible enough. The real issue is whether the airlines still have the power to persuade Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration to put safety second.
Consider what happened after a passenger suffering from delirium stormed the cockpit of an Alaska Airlines jet two years ago. Unions representing pilots and flight attendants beseeched members of Congress for help in requiring airlines to fortify all cockpit doors, among other safety improvements. They were essentially ignored until a week after Sept. 11.
Mica correctly points out that the Transportation Department can’t possibly purchase by mid-January the more than 2,100 FAA-certified explosives-detection scanners that America’s 453 airports need to screen all bags effectively. But the bill, anticipating that problem, allows airlines to comply in the interim with a rule that nobody may check a bag without getting on the plane. This procedure is already followed on international flights.
Bag-matching obviously wouldn’t deter suicidal terrorists, but it could prevent tragedies like Pan Am 103, downed in Scotland in 1988 by a bomb in unaccompanied baggage. It offers passengers much better odds than the present devil-may-care system, under which less than 10% of checked bags are given any scrutiny at all.
