Flight Security Still All but Overlooks Workers

Security measures at the nation’s airports focus primarily on screening passengers while paying scant attention to thousands of airline and airport employees with unfettered access to commercial airplanes.

Even after last week’s hijackings and terrorist attacks on the East Coast, no national policy has been established to assure that airport workers don’t smuggle weapons or explosives onto aircraft.

A patchwork of practices that varies from airport to airport and airline to airline allows some employees to gain access to aircraft using an identification badge without going through metal detectors or security screenings as do passengers.

These and other airline security issues are expected to be raised during two days of congressional hearings that begin today.

“There is clearly a need for a wholesale reevaluation of our aviation security system,” Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of a Senate Commerce subcommittee on aviation, said in a statement.

The Federal Aviation Administration last week ordered airlines and airports to conduct random screening of flight crews but not other workers with access to aircraft.

At Los Angeles International Airport this week, some Delta Air Lines flight crews and other airline employees were being checked with hand-held screening wands before boarding buses to the terminal.

But other carriers at LAX and across the nation let some employees go to work on planes without passing through screening devices, as long as they possess airport identification.

United Air Lines ground crews and mechanics at San Francisco International Airport use their airport-issued ID badges to board buses that take them to terminal gates, but they do not pass through security checkpoints.

“It has never been done,” said Mike McCarron, assistant deputy director at San Francisco International Airport. “It has been talked about but never seen as practical.”

New security procedures at Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports require that flight crews pass through metal detectors. Yet airline ground crews who load baggage and service planes do not undergo the same screening.

Concerned about such weaknesses, officials at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport this week closed access gates and doors normally used by airline employees and ordered them to pass through metal detectors along with passengers.

Airport officials at the sprawling Texas airport are calling on Congress to enact tough new national requirements, including a federal takeover of airport security and retroactive background checks on employees issued airport ID badges.

“There needs to be somebody accountable,” said Kevin Cox, senior vice president at the airport. “Security checkpoints at airports are part of a network. Any point in that chain that is weak makes the rest of that chain weak.”

Denver Ground Crews Go Through Screenings

Until this week, ground crews at Denver International Airport parked in a remote lot and used their ID badges to get on a bus that would carry them directly to the concourses where aircraft were parked.

“That is stopped,” said airport spokesman Chuck Cannon. “They go through security screening just like a passenger.”

In 1999, Miami International Airport became the first airport in the country that insisted all of its ramp workers pass through metal detectors and have their bags X-rayed. The procedure began after almost 60 baggage handlers and other ramp workers were arrested in a federal sting operation on suspicion of smuggling drugs.

For more than a decade, critical reports and investigations have warned it was easy for employees to smuggle weapons onto commercial airlines.

The issue first gained recognition in 1987, when a fired airline employee used his company identification badge to bypass screening at LAX and carry a gun aboard a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight.

En route to San Francisco, David A. Burke killed his former boss and shot the pilots. Forty-three people died when the plane smashed into a hillside in San Luis Obispo County.

Four years later, a distraught baggage handler, Roman Soriano Vasquez, smuggled a handgun to work at LAX and shot himself in the cargo hold of an Alitalia 747.

And just one day before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a federal judge in Santa Ana sentenced a former security guard at an LAX duty-free shop to five years in prison for conspiring to bypass airport security and smuggle firearms and explosives onto an airliner.

Lionel Rodriguez, 31, of Diamond Bar, smuggled 10 guns, plastic explosives and four fake hand grenades around metal detectors, using his airport ID in the fall of 1999.

He delivered the weapons to a man he thought was a weapons dealer, but who turned out to be an undercover agent. Part of his work was to carry packages from the duty-free shop to passengers in the boarding area.

BillieVincent, who served as the FAA’s director of civil aviation security from 1982 to 1986, said the lack of screening for employees is a hole in the system that ought to be plugged.

‘One of the hardest things to protect in any security system is to protect against insiders,” he said.

Vincent, now president of a private security firm, recommended that employees be subject to metal detectors and that airports take steps to make certain a person holding an access card is really the employee to whom it was issued.

Investigators Document Weaknesses in Security

The problems have been well documented.

From late 1998 to early last year, federal investigators from the U.S. Department of Transportation tried to find out how easy it would be for a hijacker to board an airliner without bothering to pass through a metal detector.

Acting like airport employees, investigators walked or drove into supposedly secured airport ramp areas and climbed aboard parked aircraft in exercises that, at many airports, were quite easy.

“We were able to penetrate secure areas without wearing airport ID by following employees through access control points,” investigators said.

In the first round of tests, conducted at eight major airports in 1998, investigators reported that more than two-thirds of the time no one challenged them when they entered secured areas without proper IDs.

Alexis Stefani, an assistant inspector general of the Department of Transportation, told Congress last year that investigators entered those areas 117 times during the tests and were able to board aircraft operated by 35 airlines.

“Passengers were on board 18 of the aircraft we boarded,” Stefani said. “In 12 instances, we were seated and ready for departure at the time we concluded our tests.”

The test results reflect security troubles stretching more than a decade.

The inspector general’s office had issued previous reports--in 1993 and 1996--saying it was too easy for unauthorized people to get into supposedly secure areas.

The General Accounting Office, an investigatory arm of Congress, raised similar concerns in 1988 and again in 1994.

The FAA conducted more tests at 79 airports in early 1999, Stefani said, with similar results.

Investigators posing as employees were able to enter secured areas 56% of the times they tried.

In still more tests at 10 airports in late 1999, undercover operatives got through 40% of the time.

The FAA expanded its testing to 83 airports in February and March 2000 and found that agents got through 31% of the time. In the tests last year, the undercover operatives reported that they boarded 83 airplanes without being challenged, officials told Congress.

Other problems involving employee background checks have cropped up at many major airports, a Department of Transportation official told Congress last year. Recent audits at six airports showed that reference checks for job applicants were frequently not done, Stefani said.

The large Atlanta-based airport security firm Argenbright Holdings Ltd. was ordered to pay fines and restitution of $1.5 million last October by a federal judge for falsifying background checks on 1,300 of its security-screening employees at Philadelphia International Airport from 1995 to 1999. Some of the employees turned out to have felony convictions for drug dealing, kidnapping and assault. Argenbright now provides screening services at Newark and Dulles airports.

Armed with such evidence, Congress last year increased background screening requirements--ordering checks for all employees, not just those whose applications aroused suspicions. It also expanded the list of criminal offenses that disqualify applicants from holding airport jobs.

In addition, an FAA rule to take effect in November will subject employees who violate security procedures to fines. As of now, only airline companies can be fined.

Under the new rule, individuals could be fined hundreds of dollars for failing to challenge someone without a badge in an area where aircraft are parked.

Previous audits have established lapses in the management of ID badges at a number of airports, including LAX.

An audit of six airports last year showed that nearly one out of 10 IDs “remained active,” even though some of the employees to whom they were issued no longer worked there.

Many employee representatives said they welcome measures to tighten security.

“This tragedy can’t repeat itself,” said Scotty Ford, president of the International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers local in Northern California.

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Times staff writers Nancy Cleeland, Geoffrey Mohan, Tim Reiterman, Jocelyn Y. Stewart and Daniel Yi contributed to this report.