Word: denver
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...airports are coping with those challenges, a team of TIME reporters and photographers decided to take an in-depth look at one airport, Denver International. It's an airport that to a large extent has adapted nicely to the post-Sept. 11 world. The huge, snaking security lines that attracted so much attention in the weeks after last year's terrorist attacks have largely disappeared even as traffic has edged back to pre-9/11 levels. Last Wednesday, on the busy day before the July 4 holiday, 115,000 travelers passed through Denver International Airport, compared with...
Behind the scenes, however, Denver International is struggling with many of the same security issues facing all the other U.S. airports. The screening process for passengers (handled by two private security firms at Denver and supervised by the TSA) is cumbersome, arbitrary and questionably efficient. (In a TSA study of 32 airports, not including Denver, nearly one-quarter of all fake weapons carried by undercover TSA agents were not detected.) The fact that most checked luggage is still not being screened for explosives remains a glaring lapse, and there's a raging dispute over the machines the TSA has selected...
...china-shop approach. "They may be fine folks at the TSA," says Baumgartner, "but they don't know anything about building an airport-security system or running an airport." William Pickle, a former Secret Service official who has just taken over as the TSA's top man in Denver, acknowledges the tensions. "The TSA is trying to be both a law-enforcement agency and a regulatory agency, and virtually everyone at TSA is new to aviation," he says. "It is an enormous task...
...want to assess the state of airport security in America, Denver is a good place to start, for it is in many respects a role model. It is the newest big-city airport in the U.S. (it opened in February 1995) and by many measures the best run. Though it is the fifth busiest airport in the U.S., it has had the lowest rate of delays for four straight years. This is due partly to its five nonintersecting runways (a sixth is under construction) and equipment that makes Denver the only airport that can allow three simultaneous landings if needed...
...this exurban behemoth (larger than the city of Denver itself, it covers 53 sq. mi.), with its tentlike spires and cavernous, convention-hall interior, has its user-unfriendly quirks. Passengers who are dropped off at the airport by cab or rental-car van find themselves, for some odd reason, at the exit. To reach the ticket counter, they have to lug their bags up an escalator. The three gate concourses are connected by a train system that is fast and convenient--except when it's not working (which lately has not been very often and usually for only short periods...