Is Your Holiday Flight Home Safe?
Nov. 16, 2005 — -- Post-9/11, billions of dollars have been spent on airport screeners and personnel. Travelers routinely remove their shoes and wait in line to be checked along with their bags, all in the belief that passengers and crew will be protected against an act of terror in the cabin.
But now, as 21 million people prepare to go home for the holidays, a new government report warns there is a frightening vulnerability -- the cargo lying beneath all those passengers may not be safe.
According to the independent report by the Government Accountability Office, on average about half of the baggage compartment on a passenger plane is filled with commercial cargo -- 6 billion pounds of merchandise per year -- and nearly all of it passes through without being physically inspected or scanned for explosives.
"My concern is that there is a gaping loophole through which al Qaeda could put cargo on passenger planes that could lead to an explosion unlike anything we have seen since 9/11," said Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., one of the lawmakers who commissioned the report from Congress' investigative and auditing arm.
The revelation also is a concern in the cockpit. "Pilots are extremely unhappy with the fact that cargo is unscreened," said Gary Boettcher, an American Airlines pilot and president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Association. "They believe it is a threat to themselves and to passengers."
The report says the Transportation Security Administration does not effectively monitor airport cargo storage areas, that the agency lacks the technology to screen all cargo now; and that it would cost almost $4 billion over 10 years to get it.
In a statement to ABC News, the TSA said it has made some progress in the last year by requiring airlines to conduct triple-random inspections of cargo, by hiring an additional hundred cargo inspectors and by testing new technologies to screen cargo.
"TSA has established a strong layered system of security in the air cargo arena and recognizes the need to do more," spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said.
Critics say that's not enough and that, four years after 9/11, priorities are still wrong. "The risk isn't the grandma or the aunt or uncle or mom or dad," Boettcher said. "The risk is the unscreened cargo … our focus is in the wrong place."
The report also notes that it is voluntary for known shippers to be in the TSA database. As a result, the TSA admits to having contact information for less than a third of the known shippers who could be sending cargo on the planes taking people home for the holidays.
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