Word: argenbright
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...personally and professionally devastated," says Argenbright, whose experience will be chronicled as part of a critical book about airline safety due out this fall, Unsafe At Any Altitude...
...Before Sept. 11, 2001, Argenbright was CEO of the world's largest private airport security screening firm, the 20-year-old, Atlanta-based Argenbright Security, which had 25,000 employees screening passengers at 44 domestic and 28 European airports. That business vanished soon thereafter when the Transportation Security Administration was created. Argenbright started his new company, AirServ, in 2002, contracting with airlines to provide workers who check passenger IDs at checkpoints, along with services such as ticket processing, bus transportation and cargo handling. And now that his business once again could be supplanted by the federal government, the airline security...
...head of the company whose screeners worked at two of the three airports targeted on Sept. 11 - Newark and Washington's Dulles - Argenbright quickly became a scapegoat in the aftermath of the terror attacks. On Oct. 12, 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly announced that parent company "Argenbright Holdings continues to violate laws that protect the safety of Americans who travel by commercial airlines." Ashcroft based his comments on a 1999 guilty plea and agreement Argenbright had made with the federal government when a screener at a Pennsylvania airport was busted for drug possession, which led to evidence that...
...They're hiring the wrong model," he says of today's screeners. Few of them are African-American or immigrants, Argenbright says. "After 9/11 people wanted white, West Point-looking cadets, and from a PR standpoint that worked, but college-age or college grads are the worst screeners...
...Argenbright points to a study he commissioned by researchers at Georgia Tech University that found that non-college-educated minorities were the best screeners, both because they took the most pride in the job and because they became less bored or distracted with the repetition of watching x-ray screens or staffing metal detectors...