New Airport Screeners Failing Tougher Tests, Officials Say

Undercover agents continue to regularly sneak mock bombs and weapons past federal airport security screeners, despite the $5 billion a year taxpayers are spending to safeguard aviation, government and industry officials say.

The Transportation Security Administration refused to discuss specific undercover testing results and methods, but said the inspections are much tougher than those conducted before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“In the old days, the test items consisted of things you might see in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon,” said TSA spokesman Robert Johnson. The agents’ “job now is to go out and break the system, so we can improve the system.”

Because the TSA undercover tests are more sophisticated, Johnson said “you cannot compare” the failure rates of federal screeners with those of the previous minimum-wage screeners employed by the airlines.

But the failures have alarmed lawmakers overseeing the agency, who point out that Al Qaeda operatives would also be expected to use sophisticated subterfuge to get weapons and explosives aboard an airliner.

“If the tests are tougher and the screeners are still failing, then we’ve got a problem,” said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House aviation subcommittee. “The feedback I’m getting is that results aren’t much different than when we had a private workforce.”

Mica has asked Congress’ watchdog agency, the General Accounting Office, to evaluate the performance of TSA screeners and its undercover testing program. Private screeners failed a quarter of the time in one series of tests performed last year, before the federal takeover of airport security was complete.

Several federal screeners said the problem is insufficient training.

“It’s real easy to spot scissors, but people who want to get weapons on board are going to be more clever,” said a screener at Los Angeles International Airport. “We are not getting familiar with the stuff I think we need to get familiar with, particularly explosives.”

Some also said that the agency, in its rush to hire staff last year, took on some screeners who don’t take the job seriously.

“Part of the problem is they’ve got incompetent people who don’t realize they are guarding a plane that’s going to be 35,000 feet in the air, as opposed to guarding your local Target store,” said a senior screener at a Bay Area airport.

The screeners asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs.

Shortly after he was appointed last summer, TSA chief James M. Loy told reporters one of his main goals was to set up a realistic and rigorous system for inspecting the screeners.

Government and aviation industry officials say the results of TSA’s testing have been disappointing.

The pass/fail rate is classified, said a government official who has been briefed on the testing, but “if you look at it on strictly percentage terms, it’s no better” than before Sept. 11. The official acknowledged, however, that “the testing is not easy.”

Aggressive testing will not result in a 100% detection rate, said Cathal Flynn, who headed the Federal Aviation Administration’s security branch during much of the 1990s. Homemade bombs assembled by experts are particularly hard to catch, he said.

“If you don’t see a pistol, you’re obviously asleep,” said Flynn, “but improvised explosive devices can be quite subtle. Finding them is a 50-50 proposition, and even people who are very good can fail the test.”

Working an airport X-ray machine can be repetitive work. A screener has only an instant to evaluate what’s inside each bag. Even the best miss “threat objects” about 20% of the time in realistic testing, experts said.

TSA spokesman Johnson said the agency’s undercover teams deliberately try to breach security. “They consider themselves the friendly terrorists,” Johnson said. “It’s their job to find the holes and plug them.”

Although airport police are notified just prior to the test -- to prevent misunderstandings that could lead to violence -- screeners do not know the inspectors and are not told they are coming, Johnson said. One member of the undercover team scouts the checkpoint, selecting a lane that might offer an opportunity. The team is looking for problems with equipment, procedures or people.

After the test, inspectors meet with the screeners to discuss what they did right or wrong. Since its inception a few months ago, Johnson said the testing already has led to several changes in procedures.

Screeners have confiscated more than 5 million prohibited items at checkpoints in the last 13 months, including more than 1,160 firearms.

But among the more than 55,000 federal screeners checking passengers and bags, some joke that TSA’s initials stand for “taking scissors away” and they worry about their ability to spot more deadly objects.

“We find box cutters because they have tendency to leap out at you, but when you are talking about a block of Semtex [explosive], some little wiring and a battery pack, I don’t feel like we have been given enough training,” said a TSA supervisor who works in Southern California.

The TSA appears to be making uneven use of a computerized training tool for X-ray screeners that the government has touted for years.

The software is supposed to cause realistic images of guns, knives and bombs to be randomly projected on the X-ray screen. It also records the operator’s reaction. Known as TIPS -- Threat Image Projection System -- it can serve both as a training tool and as a way to rate performance.

Two supervisors, one in Southern California and one in the Bay Area, said TIPS is in very limited use. The Southern California supervisor said the software sometimes has a glitch that allows discerning screeners to know if they are being tested.

Beyond broader use of TIPS, TSA should hold regular training sessions in which screeners can examine and handle mock homemade bombs, said the Southern California supervisor. Photographs and diagrams are not enough.

“I would really like to know what I’m looking for,” the supervisor said. “I would like to have hands-on training over and over again, and the screeners I work with say the same thing.”

Passenger checkpoints are “not the be-all and end-all of airport security,” TSA spokesman Johnson said.

Checkpoints have improved, he maintained, but travelers can be confident that there are other safeguards such as better intelligence, reinforced cockpit doors and more air marshals.

Gerald Dillingham, director of aviation issues for the General Accounting Office, said he is not sure what his agency will find as it conducts its evaluation of the TSA for Congress.

“The target is harder than it was before,” he said.

“But you could spend the whole gross national product on trying to secure aviation, and you’re still going to have gaps.”