Air Cargo Still Largely Unchecked

By ANDY PASZTOR

08/15/06 "WSJ" -- -- Last week's terror threat forced passengers to drop bottles of water and soda, tubes of toothpaste and hand lotion, and cans of hair spray and shaving cream into the trash before boarding jetliners. But unbeknownst to most passengers, airlines loaded aluminum containers filled with largely unchecked freight into the bellies of those same planes.

Despite years of concern from critics who see it as an obvious weak link in the nation's aviation-security net, little has been done to screen cargo because of daunting technical challenges and stiff industry resistance.

"It's one of the most disturbing issues out there," says Robert Francis, an aviation-safety consultant and former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Now, San Francisco International Airport has launched an innovative bomb-detection program that aims to make it the first U.S. airfield to screen virtually every cargo shipment -- regardless of size or content -- before it is loaded into an airliner.

San Francisco's effort will combine explosive-detection equipment that is now used to examine baggage with other screening devices, human inspectors and even packs of canine sniffers to upgrade cargo security. The project, directed by scientists from nearby Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other federal research organizations, was announced less than two months before the bomb plot was foiled last week in Great Britain.

Last week's revelations are bound to increase public concerns about potential air-cargo loopholes, just as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks pushed the same issues into the spotlight five years earlier. About one quarter of all U.S. air cargo is transported by U.S. passenger planes. Based on the best current estimates, between 10% and 15% of the more than six billion pounds of cargo that flies that way each year ends up actually inspected. (Even less of the freight flown on cargo carriers is screened.) Instead, airlines and federal security officials largely rely on so-called trusted-shipper safeguards. These focus on the credentials of established freight-forwarders and companies who register with the government, rather than on the actual contents of individual shipments. Aside from some random screenings, inspections are reserved for cargo of unknown or suspicious origin.

The Transportation Security Administration hasn't yet certified any machines for cargo screening, and federal officials say none of today's nascent technologies were designed to handle high cargo volumes. Unlike examining individual packages, many cargo containers are capable of holding a mix of items from fruits to paper to machine parts, any one of which could contain a small amount of explosive material. Airlines have staunchly resisted widespread airport screening because of costs and potential delays caused by false alarms. U.S. carriers get about $4 billion in revenue annually from cargo carried along with passengers, and they worry that unreliable scanners could play havoc with schedules.

San Francisco's pioneering program hopes to demonstrate ways around that dilemma, largely through more-effective use of devices and tools that already are available. The goal is to screen 95% of cargo on passenger jets. Recommendations from the $30 million initiative -- which will later include a similar project in Cincinnati and one in Seattle to search cargo for stowaways -- are expected to be available by late 2007.

Doug Bauer, Livermore's program director for the project, says he aims to develop templates many other airports could follow to increase screening capacity depending on factors such as seasonal shifts in types of goods being shipped.

For airline pilot unions and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, an outspoken critic who previously called cargo security rules "a national scandal," such moves can't come fast enough. A year ago, Rep. Markey complained that the TSA was avoiding screening cargo on passenger jets "in any meaningful way."

Even though the work under way in San Francisco was prompted partly from criticism by Rep. Markey and a handful of other lawmakers, he says he is "still gravely concerned about gaping aviation-security loopholes."

In November 2005, the Government Accountability Office took the TSA to task for, among other things, allowing potentially dangerous cargo-security gaps to persist, failing to systematically collect data on past security breaches and having incomplete information about shippers.

The TSA continues to rely on a broad multilevel approach to cargo because "there is no silver-bullet technology out there," according to senior agency official Robert Jamison. By "looking at the people, the shipments and the supply chain" in tandem, Mr. Jamison says, "we've ramped up our focus on air cargo" in the past year or so," from mandating background checks for armies of air-cargo employees to 100% screening of all small packages left at airport counters.

The number of cargo inspectors, for example, has tripled to 300 nationwide and "we've drastically ramped up our canine patrols," Mr. Jamison says. The idea is "moving our assets around the airport" and conducting random inspections "to provide a level of unpredictability" to keep would-be terrorists off balance.

While a spokeswoman says the Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade group, favors the current approach and additional research into new technologies, "we feel that canine screening deserves far more support" from the TSA.

So far, Congress has largely gone along with that approach to cargo security on airliners, despite a growing bipartisan push for changes and demands that the TSA develop more-reliable technology and more-effective screening systems. "What do you think would happen to the airline industry," Rep. Norm Dicks, a Democrat from Washington State, asked rhetorically during a House hearing last month, "if a bomb in an uninspected cargo exploded, bringing down a passenger plane?"

Faced with lower volume and less industry opposition, other countries are honing new ways to inspect cargo. Israel and the Netherlands already screen much of the cargo placed aboard passenger planes with a combination of machines, inspectors and dogs, according to U.S. lawmakers and industry officials. And under European Union regulations, some freight forwarders have their own X-ray equipment as well as a legal obligation to vouch that inspections have been properly carried out.

Some in the industry see a potential gold mine if cargo inspections become more prevalent. L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., a major supplier of baggage-screening equipment, has told Congress it believes that with some modifications, current-generation equipment is capable of inspecting more than two-thirds of the cargo at issue.

While other makers of screening-equipment are skeptical of such claims, congressional pressure and heightened public recognition of the threat means "things clearly are progressing in that direction," according to Joe Reiss, marketing director of American Science & Engineering Inc., a Billerica, Mass., manufacturer of security equipment.

Even if it the technology becomes more feasible, however, "I'm not sure the [airline] industry will support it," says aviation-security consultant Rick Gordon of Civitas LLP in Washington.

Once the program takes off in San Francisco, which shipped roughly 500,000 tons of freight on both passenger and cargo flights last year, the aim is boosting the speed of the screening process at least sixfold. Simulations and computer models will be used to determine steps to further expand capacity, and how to spread those concepts to potentially hundreds of additional airports nationwide.

Still, Mr. Gordon predicts a long and difficult battle for industry acceptance. Anybody who thinks "you're going to throw money at the problem and get 100% cargo screening in the next year or two," he says, "that's just foolish."

--Daniel Michaels contributed to this article.

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