This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@juno.com. /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Presenting the reloadable Starbucks Card. The Starbucks Card is reloadable from $5 - $500. Fill it up. Use it. Use it. Then, fill it up again. https://www.starbucks.com/shop/reload.asp?ci=672 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Air Travel Fear Fades, but Experts Still Worry March 10, 2002 By DAVID FIRESTONE This article was reported by David Firestone, Micheline Maynard and Matthew L. Wald and was written by Mr. Firestone. KNOXVILLE, Tenn., March 6 - The new world of air travel begins even before passengers get inside McGhee Tyson Airport here in eastern Tennessee. Just to park in the short-term airport garage, drivers now have to open their trunks and consent to a full inspection of their cars. The body and bag searches come later. Nonetheless, to the amazement of the parking lot manager, there have been more than 2,000 cars every day in the garage for the last three weeks, almost a return to the 2,200 that were there on Sept. 10. Month by month, the airport is winning back most of those who deserted the skies after Sept. 11. "For a while, we were down to 1,500 cars, but it's coming right back to where it used to be," said Brad Scheafnocker, the airport's director of parking services. "And people aren't so cranky anymore. Instead of venting on us, they offer to pop the trunk before they're asked. It's like people have just come to accept that this is the way it's going to be." Throughout the country, millions of people have overcome their fears and accepted once-unthinkable delays, inconveniences and privacy losses to travel by air - the most directly felt tremor, for most Americans, of the terrorist attacks six months ago on Monday. Many in the industry say that for all the visible security measures - National Guard members with their rifles, the painstaking searches for nail files - aviation is not yet secure enough. They say that a terrorist with a bomb or knife could still evade the net, laying bare the industry's continued fragility and devastating the confidence among travelers that has returned month by month. In fact, the security gaps that made the September attacks possible are proving much more difficult to close than had been initially hoped, government officials and safety experts say. Bags are still not matched to passengers on connecting flights. A terrorist could smuggle a ceramic knife past overwhelmed and undertrained security guards. But already there are signs that the national imperative to fly is so strong that people are accepting, and, in a sense, routing around their difficulties and fears. In the last three months, low fares have won back more than half the travelers who stopped flying in September and October. Regional airports like McGhee Tyson or John Wayne Airport south of Los Angeles are returning to normal much more quickly than the big international hubs, in part because their security lines are so much shorter. Travelers are now used to getting up earlier for morning flights, wearing shoes without metal shanks and packing bags in anticipation of emptying them out. This gulf of expectations, between increasingly confident passengers and nervous safety experts, emerged in interviews with travelers, airline executives and government officials who were asked to assess the state and experience of air travel six months after the events of Sept. 11. Most agree that while the balance between vigilance and convenience has hardly been perfected. The gap has narrowed more than anyone predicted just a few months ago. Security delays are shrinking, even at the hubs, and many airlines are telling passengers they can now arrive 90 minutes before departure, rather than two hours. (Northwest Airlines cut the time to 75 minutes after adding 19 security lanes; United Airlines added 30 lanes and cut the time to an hour.) As troubled private security companies are gradually replaced with better-paid federal workers, the pledge of 10-minute checkpoint lines made so often by government and airline officials no longer seems so far-fetched. "Traffic will come back stronger than people think," said Jonathan C. Orenstein, chief executive of the Mesa Air Group, whose company operates commuter flights under the America West and US Airways brands and flies as Mesa Airlines in New Mexico and Colorado. "Once people think it's sort of safe to go back in the water, you'll see some significant increases in travel." Real Shield Is Distant That soothing veneer of security, however, may be far thinner than many passengers imagine. While improvements are unquestionable, many regulators and industry officials say, the real goal of erecting an impenetrable shield against weapons and bombs remains distant. Several times a month, it seems, an airport terminal has to be cleared because of an error: an unplugged magnetometer, a screener who lost track of a passenger. Capt. Stephen A. Luckey, chairman of the security panel at the Air Line Pilots Association, said that when he flew recently from his home in Montana, airport screeners missed his Swiss Army and hunting knives. They did find and confiscate his small scissors. Even the strongest airline boosters admit that almost no real progress has been made on bomb detection. No airports have enough technology to thoroughly examine many checked bags, and the recent program to match bags with passengers is effective only if one believes that terrorists are not suicidal. (Or that they have not noticed that bags are not matched to passengers on connecting flights.) "We started on Sept. 11 at a 2," said Kevin P. Mitchell of the Business Travel Coalition, measuring security on a scale of 1 to 10. "We're probably at a 4 to 5, and it's probably going to take four or five years to get to an 8. We're safer than we were on 9/11, but we aren't safe enough." The assessment is widely shared because the federal government, which has assumed responsibility for airline security, has so much yet to accomplish. The new Transportation Safety Administration set up by Congress to take over security from the airlines, has established rules on who may be a screener but has not actually hired any. It will probably start doing so in May, at which point it will have to hire them at the staggering rate of 5,000 per month - with background checks and training required for each. Ideally those checks will weed out security guards like the two at Kennedy International Airport charged on Wednesday with trying to rob a Staples store on Long Island. The government has promised intensive testing and training of new screeners, a regimen that grew in importance after the agency acknowledged last year that it will not require them to have a high-school diploma. But many of the agency's critics say that even a promised increase in starting pay to $23,000 will not necessarily raise the quality of screeners. "They're mostly going to be hiring the same people who were there before," said Michael Boyd, an outspoken aviation industry consultant based in Colorado. The government says it wants 40,000 screeners instead of the current 28,000, but some experts predict 60,000 screeners will eventually be necessary. Even when the immense screening system is in place, supervised by well-paid federal overseers at every airport, it will only examine passengers and bags brought into the airplane cabin. Many in the industry say checked baggage poses the more serious threat. Congress wanted a system in place by February that would prevent a bag from being loaded without its owner on the plane. The new security agency complied, but only for the first leg of a flight. The Congressional goal of a more reliable bomb-detection system for baggage by the end of the year by scanning every bag in giant imaging machines has been virtually written off. The Transportation Security Administration says it would take about 2,200 machines, and buying and installing that many would cost about $4.8 billion, assuming the two companies certified to build them could turn out that many. The detectors are the size of a minivan and considerably heavier, and most airports will have to renovate buildings to install them. Concern About Technology "We are extremely concerned about the state of current explosive- detection technology," said William F. Marrison, president of the Metropolitan Knoxville Airport Authority, whose airport has already tested many next-generation detection devices. "Even if we knew what we were supposed to do with these devices, it would be difficult to have them ready in time for the December deadline. We just don't have room for them now." The federal security agency acknowledges that the devices are too clunky and expensive to have them at every airport, so it has chosen for now to use some of those machines in combination with the machines used to swipe carry-ons and shoes for traces of explosives. But those are still months from being in place for checked bags. "The problem here is that we have overpromised the American people what can be done," said James E. Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Passengers, however, often do not see the gaps that the industry insiders do. A tracking poll of 300 frequent fliers conducted by the Wirthlin organization found that in November, 57 percent were confident that airport security could stop terrorist bombs or weapons, while in January, 71 percent expressed such confidence. That optimism is also reflected in passenger traffic, which was off by 14 percent in January over the previous year, compared with 34 percent in September. David Swierenga, chief economist for the Air Transport Association, the airline trade group, said that the industry could return to pre-September levels by summer, assuming the economy keeps improving. The passenger counts have been buoyed by extremely low fares. Business travel, which is less affected by fares, may have suffered a long-term blow, some airline executives say, after companies realized that some lost travel had not really been necessary. But beyond the discounts, many people in the field say that aviation is also benefiting from the nation's rallying, wartime mood, and the perception that the country has regained control of its destiny. "There's a distance now from the events of September," said David R. Conklin, the Knoxville airport's vice president for marketing. "People saw the Olympics pass without any incident, and the Super Bowl, and that carries over into the total perception that things are more under control now." Having spent months making mental adjustments to their expectations, passengers no longer compare their airport experiences to the days before September. Instead, many are delighted that lines are shrinking somewhat and that the tension in the air seems to have diminished. "I think people were more scared months ago, when passengers saw all the army and cops all outside around the corner when they pull into the airport terminal and get dropped off," said Jose Alvalle, a shuttle driver at MacArthur Airport in Islip, N.Y. "But the passengers I speak with them every day, they tell me they're more calm now, most of them." Even repeated delays never imagined before September seem routine now. Rupert Jessop, a cable technician who lives in Colorado Springs, was singled out at the ticket counter at Denver International Airport last week to have his checked bag X- rayed. Whether the decision was random or not - it has happened on each of the four flights he has taken since September - Mr. Jessop says he has come to accept it. "It just seems to be part of the security, the randomness," Mr. Jessop said. "It's required and it's better to be safe than sorry." Of course, some airports still have long security lines at peak periods: two-hour lines at Kennedy, an hour at La Guardia and in Atlanta. But while many hub airports like Dallas-Fort Worth have reduced their average lines to 10 minutes at peak hours, many travelers have discovered that smaller, regional airports are often the most efficient. More Money, Shorter Lines While Los Angeles International Airport, for example, had more than 18 percent fewer passengers in January than in January 2001, the smaller John Wayne Airport, 35 miles south in Orange County, lost less than 3 percent of its passengers from that month last year. John Wayne's traffic in February was within 1 percent of last February's. Many travelers who might once have driven farther to a hub are now willing to spend a bit of extra money for shorter lines. Deborah C. McElroy, president of the Regional Airline Association, confirmed that the shorter-haul regional airlines and airports are doing much better. Many commuter routes that were canceled after September have been restored, she said, often with jets that have improved the speed and efficiency of short-haul travel. In many ways, in fact, the post- September slowdown clearly did make many airlines and airports more efficient. La Guardia, which had become seriously crowded last year, is now more manageable after several airlines eliminated less-popular flights. Major airlines bumped a lower percentage of passengers from flights last year than any year since records were first kept in 1974, according to the Transportation Department. At United Airlines last month, 86 percent of the company's planes arrived at their gates within 14 minutes of scheduled arrival, which was tied for the airline's best performance, according to United's senior vice president, Peter D. McDonald. Those efficiencies are combining to lure more passengers into the air, which could cause the industry to return to its bloated ways. But airline executives also know that with just one slip at a checkpoint, one more hijacking or bomb, the frail recovery could collapse. If that happens, Ms. McElroy said, "the industry recognizes that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to recover." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/national/10FLYI.html?ex=1016780429&ei=1&en=8b91f954d124541b 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 onlinesales@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 2002 The New York Times Company