More Security, More Delays

By Ed Magnuson

You race for the commuter flight from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C., reaching the airport with minutes to spare. A surprisingly long line of passengers still waits ahead of you. A security agent pulls you aside to quiz you about your shoulder bag and suitcase: "Did you pack them yourself? Have they been in your possession since then? Why are you flying to Charlotte? Are you carrying any gifts? Did anybody give you a package to take to someone else?"

While your carry-on is being X-rayed, you step through the metal detector. It screeches. You dump your coins in a tray and try again. Screech. You remove your metal-rimmed glasses. Screech. As other latecomers fidget behind you, you remove your belt -- and finally pass through. The machine is so sensitive that your tiny buckle set it off.

As you rush down the gangway, a guard steers you to the tarmac. There you join other passengers who checked luggage: each traveler must identify his bag before it is loaded aboard the aircraft. Finally, you take your seat. But the screening has postponed takeoff for 45 minutes.

Would U.S. domestic air travelers put up with such delays and intrusions for the increased assurance that no terrorist bomb is aboard their flight? They may have to, if the Bush Administration adopts the recommendations of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, which last week proposed some 60 strong steps for avoiding another tragedy like the midair destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. That disaster, said the commission's tough 182-page report, "may well have been preventable." The report blamed Pan Am's "seriously flawed" security system for loading an apparently unaccompanied suitcase containing a plastic explosive into the cargo hold of the New York-bound Boeing 747.

The seven-member commission conceded that there is "much less" of a terrorist threat to flights within the U.S. than to international ones. Nonetheless, the commission urged that domestic travelers undergo the same tight screening that the Federal Aviation Administration now requires of U.S. airlines on international flights. The panel, headed by former Labor Secretary Ann McLaughlin, asked the FAA to station a security manager at major U.S. airports. FAA administrator James Busey, who praised the report, said some of the recommendations, including one for more sensitive metal detection, might go into effect within a "few weeks."

Many Americans say they would welcome stricter security while flying. In a poll last week for TIME/CNN by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, between 75% and 80% of 500 adults questioned said they would be willing to arrive earlier for flights, undergo questioning, have their luggage searched and pass through more sensitive detectors. Also, 69% said they would be more likely to fly on an airline with such procedures.

Experience indicates otherwise. Pan Am Chairman Thomas Plaskett placed advertisements in U.S. newspapers to complain that Pan Am and other U.S. airlines are losing business overseas as travelers switch to the less security-conscious foreign carriers. Richard Lally, vice president for security at the industry's Air Transport Association, said that such rules in the U.S. would have a "disruptive impact on air travel." Yet superscreening may be appropriate when there are specific, credible terrorist threats.

The commission offered some unassailable recommendations, such as one calling for inspection of mailed packages carried by passenger planes. But the commission could run into trouble with a proposal that the U.S. Government should prepare for "pre-emptive or retaliatory" strikes "in countries well known to have engaged in state-sponsored terrorism." As Vice President, George Bush headed an antiterrorism commission that suggested such attacks, but only where they "could be surgically done." The 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya was meant as retaliation for Muammar Gaddafi's harboring of terrorists, but it was far from "surgical." Terrorists tend to hide in populated areas, and it is difficult to assemble evidence against them.

One obvious and dismaying example: though investigators strongly believe that the schemers who blew up Flight 103 are members of Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, based in Syria, no charges have even been filed, and no one seems threatened by imminent punishment.

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Washington