Word: faa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...developed in the 1970s. Those worked well for the problem of that era--hijacking--but do little to combat the threats posed by plastique or suicide bombers. "Our security system is not a model that one would hold up with any pride," says Billie Vincent, who was head of FAA security from 1982 to 1986 and now runs a consulting firm...
Among other measures, the 1990 legislation required the FAA to speed up explosives-detection research, to heighten security checks on airport personnel and to release passenger manifests within three hours of a crash. The deadline set by Congress: November 1993. The FAA failed to adhere to that timetable, blaming Congress for setting overly stringent standards and requiring complicated tests of the new technologies. But that same year--five full years after Lockerbie--the inspector general's office of the Department of Transportation released a report blasting the FAA's overall security program. It is the only such report that...
...report states baldly that airport security was still "seriously flawed" and "not adequate" at the nation's riskiest airports, which include New York City's John F. Kennedy. While the FAA had rated the four airports visited by its inspectors as "good to very good," undercover agents from the inspector general's office reached dramatically different conclusions. In 15 out of 20 attempts to gain entry to supposedly secure areas, agents had little trouble: they got into aircraft-parking areas, baggage areas, and one agent managed to slip an unarmed hand grenade through a metal detector...
Little has changed since then. Although the FAA claimed in the wake of last week's crash that it has in fact implemented all 38 provisions of the 1990 act, the inspector general's office, under Mary Schiavo, who resigned this month, has just finished an updated and still classified study that uncovered many of the same security problems found last time around. This new report shows that undercover agents successfully breached security in 40% of their attempts. That's down from 75% and clearly an improvement, but not one that creates much assurance. "It's just...
...FAA requires that all carry-on baggage for international flights be inspected, that all checked luggage be matched with a passenger, and that checked luggage be X-rayed. But a former top security official with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees Kennedy airport, says that to save time, baggage checked at curbside is often taken directly to the cargo area without going through an X-ray machine. U.S. domestic flights still do not require bags and passengers to travel together--even after the CIA issued a warning last summer that there were signs of increased...