Airport Security from
the Bottom Up

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Gerald Kauvar was staff director for the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security in the late 1990s. Russell Shaver served on the commission's staff. Bernard Rostker was undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The authors are senior policy analysts at RAND.

By Dec. 31 of this year, 100 percent of checked baggage at all U.S. airports is to be electronically screened for explosives, or so Congress mandated with the passage of the Aviation Security and Transportation Act last November. This goal, motivated by the terrorist acts of Sept. 11 and the oft-noted inadequacies of airport security inspections, simply cannot be met. And the rush to come as close as possible to satisfying the law could do U.S. aviation more harm than good.

The plan envisioned by Congress called for installing very large and very heavy scanning machines, known as explosives detection systems (EDS). There is insufficient suitable space at most large airports for the installation of these machines. The congressional plan also failed to recognize that the planned number of EDS machines could not even be manufactured by the end of 2002.

The congressional legislation greatly accelerated plans by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), which originally had scheduled the deployment of EDS equipment by 2013. What was lost in the accelerated schedule was the need to involve the airports and their tenants, the airlines, in the planning.

Each of the 453 commercial airports in the United States presents a unique challenge to baggage system designers. The current one-size-fits-all approach cannot possibly anticipate the local constraints. Nor does it adequately account for the need to integrate the EDS equipment with the baggage handling systems of the individual airlines. Until suitable airport facilities are constructed, many of the EDS machines now being acquired at a highly accelerated rate cannot be installed or seamlessly integrated with the baggage handling systems.

The current plan also fails to adequately account for the potential of long baggage check-in queues. Even the originally planned EDS deployments were too few to handle the inevitable equipment malfunctions or the anticipated (and hoped for) growth in passenger demand. Lengthy airport queues generate excessive passenger delays at airports, increase the reluctance of people to fly, and have a negative impact on U.S. economic growth.

Despite these shortfalls in planning, we can still take many steps to improve baggage screening. These steps will not achieve the congressional mandate for 2002, but they will go a long way toward increasing airport security.

There's Gotta Be a Better Way

As an alternative to the current top-down approach, we propose a bottom-up approach that will empower airports and airlines to work together to solve what is essentially a local problem. The federal government would play a different but no less important role. This role would be to organize, coordinate, and ensure the quality of locally designed solutions that can work in the field.

The federal government should

• establish the standards for machine and system performance

• participate in local partnerships of airports and airlines that are designing local solutions

• integrate the local plans into a national architecture

• evaluate the effectiveness of each airport's security systems

• set parameters for the longer term so that the airports will be able to incorporate the new requirements into their modernization and expansion programs

• test proposed options against a model of the national transportation system to ensure that bottlenecks do not develop and that the requirements of a hub system can be met.

A bottom-up approach should be implemented immediately. Local partnerships should be given perhaps 60 days to report to DOT concerning their requirements for government-funded EDS machines and to estimate the facility modifications needed to use the machines. DOT will still be responsible for setting the timeline for airports to receive the equipment, consistent with local plans.

We further recommend that local airports follow the example of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in using the most appropriate statistical models to provide realistic and detailed representations of the movement of passengers and baggage through an airport.

However, even if the best planning tools are used, a bottom-up approach is adopted, all the airports and airlines work productively with DOT, and maximum production of new EDS equipment is achieved—even then, the 2002 congressional deadline for the fielding of EDS machines almost certainly cannot be met.

In recent months, DOT has abandoned its total focus on EDS machines and is rapidly acquiring a large number of smaller, lighter, and less-expensive trace detection (EDT) machines to do the job. This change eases the installation problems at the airports, improving DOT's chances of being able to electronically scan all checked baggage by the end of this year. However, EDT machines are generally believed to be less accurate in detecting explosive materials.

What is needed now is a way of ensuring that the existing baggage-scanning capacity focuses on those bags most likely to pose a threat. This can be done by adopting baggage handling procedures that have been proven around the world to increase aviation security without overburdening the traveling public.

One of the most effective procedures would be the expanded use of the Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System. With this system, airport security could use a so-called "trusted traveler" program to identify the bags least likely to pose a threat. This approach is consistent with generally accepted standards of nondiscriminatory profiling used by civil aviation authorities throughout the world. The procedure would be based not on gender, race, or national origin, but rather on selecting passengers about whom a great deal is known and who exhibit behaviors that keep them off any list of likely threats. U.S. citizens with detailed background investigations on record with the government would be obvious candidates for trusted travelers.

Civil aviation authorities should also have up-to-date access to the entire range of information that can be provided by law enforcement and intelligence organizations about people who are on watch lists, have overstayed their visas, or have drawn attention to themselves for other reasons. Similar systems are used in Israel, which is generally believed to have the world's most secure civil aviation system. While it would be impractical to try to import Israel's successful system on a wholesale basis—the scale and logistics of Israeli and U.S. operations are vastly different—the concept is sound: Focus security efforts on those who arouse suspicion.

This approach to aviation safety would account for the unique conditions of airports, use the best analytic tools available to manage passenger traffic, help identify the most dangerous passengers in the short term, and ensure that national interests are safeguarded in the long term.

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