This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@juno.com. /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks. Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at special holiday prices. http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?category_name=Sale/Clearance&ci=274&cookie_test=1 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Officials Move to Ease Delays With Random Visual Checks December 25, 2001 By DAVID FIRESTONE ATLANTA, Dec. 24 - Grace Stamey came to Hartsfield International Airport today fully prepared to help keep the skies safe by removing her shoes for inspection. She had heard all about the man with the explosive shoes in Boston and assumed that the airlines would begin peering beneath laces and into soles to prevent copycats. But Ms. Stamey, who was flying to Cincinnati for Christmas with relatives, did not have to bare her feet, and neither did almost anyone else here at the nation's busiest airport. A few passengers were randomly chosen to have the exteriors of their shoes checked for traces of explosives, but even they kept their shoes on, and Ms. Stamey was not happy about it. "I want to see them do whatever it takes to keep these airplanes safe," said Ms. Stamey, a nurse from Rome, Ga. "If they're going to look inside my purse, I don't see why they can't look inside people's shoes." On Saturday, a man identified as Richard Colvin Reid was subdued aboard an American Airlines flight over the Atlantic Ocean after he apparently tried to detonate explosives hidden in the soles of his sneakers. Security experts said the incident suggested that terrorists were again spotting the weak links in airport security. After the incident, though, the Federal Aviation Administration decided not to require mandatory shoe inspections, apparently finding that the increase in protection would not be worth the added delays. The agency declined to release the contents of the security directive it sent to the airlines on Sunday evening, but airline officials said it required only random inspections of shoes, and even then not their removal from passengers' feet. "The F.A.A. is requiring visual or manual inspection of shoes, but only for randomly selected passengers at security checkpoints," said Reid Davis, a spokesman for Delta Air Lines. Only those passengers who were already randomly selected to have their bags searched would have their shoes checked, Mr. Davis said. Several hours of observation of the checkpoints at Hartsfield confirmed that procedure. A vast majority of passengers passed through the checkpoints with no manual inspection of their shoes or luggage. If a shoe contained a metal shank or eyelets, it was put through the X- ray machine, as has been the case for several months. But those machines cannot detect the presence of explosives, and no further check was made on those shoes. About one passenger in 50 was selected for a thorough inspection. In those cases, a screener hand- searched carry-on luggage, and ran a cloth swab around the outside of bags and the sides of shoe soles. The swab was then inserted in a machine that can detect traces of explosives. Many airports seemed to follow a pattern similar to that in Atlanta today, conducting random shoe checks on a handful of passengers. But the practices seem to vary by airline, and there were differences even within the same airport. At La Guardia Airport in New York, for example, the security company hired by American and Midway airlines asked all passengers, even small children, to remove their shoes and pass them through the X-ray machine. But at the US Airways terminal, passengers were told to remove their shoes only when they set off the metal detectors, and other airlines seemed to check randomly. At Reagan National Airport in Washington, a gate attendant at US Airways said there had been no changes in security procedures since the weekend. The F.A.A. order did not become mandatory until this evening, 24 hours after it was issued. But elsewhere in the airport, screeners for other airlines were clearly making an effort to run metal detecting wands over shoes, and use the cloth swabs on a random basis. The random nature of the procedure did not sit well with passengers whose previous edginess was only enhanced by the weekend incident. Bonnie Layher, a fourth-grade teacher from Greenbelt, Md., who was leaving from Reagan National for Orlando, Fla., said she was troubled that not everyone's shoes were being checked. But she said she and her husband never seriously considered changing their travel plans. "We just lost a couple of hours sleep last night, worrying," she said. Random checks are a significant part of the F.A.A.'s post-September security regimen. Airlines are allowed to use profiling information about passengers in choosing whose bags to search at the ticket counters and at gates. But the decision about whom to search thoroughly at security checkpoints is more random, because screeners have far less information than the people working at the ticket counters. At most airports, the checkpoints are the only places where explosive- detection devices are used for carry- on bags - and now, for shoes. Federal officials have previously said they believed that the fear of being randomly caught was enough to deter most potential attackers, and even today an aviation agency spokesman refused to discuss how passengers were selected for thorough inspections at checkpoints. "It's sensitive security information, and I can't talk about how an individual would be chosen for the sort of further screening that might include the screening of shoes," said Paul Turk, an F.A.A. spokesman. "But there are several ways the airlines can proceed to accomplish the necessary checks, and they might or might not be apparent to someone observing the security checkpoint." Indeed, any pattern in the selection at the Atlanta checkpoint today was not apparent to a casual observer. Those chosen to have their bags and shoes checked included a flight attendant, an elderly black man, a white man wearing a cowboy hat and boots, and an Asian woman with two small children. "I guess they thought I could pack something in these boots, but it's hard enough getting my feet in them," said Ronnie Minter of Dothan, Ala., the man in the cowboy hat. "I'm sure glad they didn't ask me to take them off." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/national/25AIRP.html?ex=1010296967&ei=1&en=0d957e4fd1d406d0 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at alyson@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company