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 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Keeping Airline Passengers Happy January 23, 2002 By JOE SHARKEY HE airline industry today has less leadership than the Taliban," scoffed Michael Boyd, the aviation industry consultant. Mr. Boyd, the president of the Boyd Group in Colorado, is among the critics in the airline industry who regard the current state of airline security as a sad joke. His weekly analyses and commentaries on the industry - available on his firm's Web site at www.aviationplanning .com - always provide provocative reading. But for more of an industry insider viewpoint on the subject, I spoke last week with Robert Crandall, the retired chief executive of American Airlines, a man who is regarded as one of the architects of the modern commercial aviation system. So far, most of the public talk about baggage matching and other innovations in airport security has ignored the elephant in the room: the general agreement among industry executives and security experts about the necessity for some form of passenger profiling. Mr. Boyd says that is because the industry lacks leadership. Mr. Crandall, who has been through his share of political storms, puts it another way. "Let me tell you a story," he said, recalling an incident from his time running American Airlines. "Many years ago, I went to Washington and testified in favor of a bill that Senator Kennedy was promoting to require employers to provide health care insurance. Now, this is something I believe in. If I was the King of Spain, every employer, large and small, would have to provide health care coverage. But after I testified, I must have gotten 25,000 letters from small-business people all over the country, basically saying, `I'm never going to ride on American Airlines again because you're a radical and a socialist communist rat.' " The moral? "Stay out of politics" when you're running an airline, Mr. Crandall said. He added: "The guys who are running the airlines now are running retail businesses in a heavily regulated industry. And they don't want to make anybody mad." People are angry nevertheless, and the airlines are taking much of the blame anyway. In the months after Sept. 11, business travelers, who fly the most, have been among the most vocal critics of the delays and other difficulties frequently encountered at crowded airport security checkpoints. There, friskings are common, carry-on bags are often minutely inspected and carelessly pushed to a heap that piles up at the end of security belts, leaving possessions askew or subject to theft. Domestic airlines, which are expected to report losses of as much as $8 billion for 2001, are deeply concerned about surveys showing that some of their best customers, frequent business travelers, have cut back on travel because of perceptions of harassment and delays at airport security. Even well-known politicians have been frisked. Former Vice President Dan Quayle, for one, has complained about being rudely subjected to unnecessarily intense searching at airport security. Two weeks ago, a 75- year-old congressman, John Dingell of Michigan, was led into an airport security room and strip-searched after steel pins in his artificial hip set off a metal detector. Critics in the industry and among passenger advocacy groups have, meanwhile, called much of this most intensive security "window dressing" that does nothing to address the most demonstrable threat, which is that an agent or agents connected to Islamic terrorist groups will again commandeer or destroy an airplane in an attack against the United States. Profiling passengers for their potential as threats is done routinely at foreign airports. Why not here? Mr. Crandall asked, echoing a sentiment that is widely held, but not publicly discussed, by most top airline executives. "We have simply got to bear in mind that the world has to be divided into those who represent real risk and those who are not a risk," he said. High on the list of nonrisk passengers, he said, are frequent business travelers. "Those people we need to give a quick once-over, but the intensive security needs to be focused on people who actually represent a risk. And in order to do that we need to set aside this nonsense of being unwilling to profile. You have to profile," he said. He added: "I don't care if the word is emotionally or politically loaded. I think we need to be talking about a combination of ethnic profiling and behavioral profiling, but principally behavioral profiling. That is, how do people behave? How do they buy their tickets? When do they get to the airport? "There are many factors. If you take people who buy tickets for cash; who fly just one way; who show up for a three-week trip with only one piece of hand baggage - these are among the clues to look for. But some of the clues may additionally be ethnic." He also cited travel patterns. "If I was confronted with a passport of a person who had traveled three times to a hostile state in the last 12 months, I would want to give that person a very attentive security review, whether they were an Arab, an Israeli, an American or whatever." As do many security experts, Mr. Crandall says he believes that El Al, the Israeli airline, has already invented the model for the best airport security. That system, besides including intense screening of baggage for bombs and other weapons, is based on having a professional work force of well-trained security personnel, some of whom have the expertise to closely question passengers who are singled out for additional inspection through profiling. "You can't fail to provide appropriate security for the bags and the cargo that's going into the belly of the plane, and you can't fail to look carefully at everybody's handbags," Mr. Crandall said. "But what we're doing now, selecting people at random for pat-down searches, picking out congressmen and 80-year-old women, that's just foolishness. We're talking about lives here. We're talking about the survival and prosperity of the U.S. economy." It is time to get the discussion going publicly, he said. "It's considered politically incorrect, of course, and most of the people who are involved in the dialogue so far are politicians who don't want to say that `yes, it is perfectly appropriate in the interest of public safety to focus on those who represent the most risk,' " Mr. Crandall said. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/23/business/23TRAV.html?ex=1012843665&ei=1&en=7c610642348d4411 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