Copyright 2002 The Washington Post

The Washington Post
June 14, 2002 Friday
Final Edition
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A09

LENGTH: 1083 words

HEADLINE: Screening Deadline Worries Grow;
Lawmakers, Aviation Experts Call Dec. 31 Goal Out of Reach

BYLINE: Greg Schneider and Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post Staff Writers

BODY:


More than six months into the government's effort to protect air travelers from terrorist attacks, there is growing concern among experts and lawmakers that the job cannot be done by the end of the year as required by law.

The Transportation Security Administration had planned to take over security at 15 of the country's 429 airports by June 1 but is close to doing so at only one, Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

Government officials insist they can meet congressional deadlines to put security screeners into all airports by Nov. 19 and to subject all luggage to scrutiny by bomb-detection equipment by Dec. 31.

To do that, the agency has put its faith in two giant contractors better known for aerospace and military work: Boeing Co., which will coordinate luggage screening, and Lockheed Martin Corp., which will devise a way to get passenger screeners into every airport.

"We have a tremendous game plan," Deputy Transportation Secretary Michael P. Jackson said in an interview. "We're very much on track for a process that starts with about 100 airports, literally, within a short period of time."

But some lawmakers and aviation experts say the TSA has waited too long and question whether the agency's mandate on timing -- set by Congress after Sept. 11 -- was realistic to begin with.

"Some of the political people involved did not want to listen to fact, to reason, even to reality, and now they're going to have to face up to it," said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Aviation subcommittee.

The president's plan to put the agency into a new Department of Homeland Security could further complicate things, Mica said.

"You're taking them in mid-transition and transitioning them again. They will report to new masters all of a sudden," said one House Republican staffer. The TSA is already in a mad race to meet year-end deadlines, the staffer said, and "I don't think they're going to make it."

Hundreds of employees from Lockheed Martin, Boeing and their subcontractors will soon fan out to the nation's airports in an effort to gauge what needs to be done. Lockheed Martin will have 146 teams deployed within a month, evaluating 150,000 tasks necessary to set up passenger checkpoints nationwide, program manager Tim Bradley said. By July, the agency will be hiring 15,000 to 20,000 federal screeners per month, Jackson said.

That's an enormous change given that the TSA has hired about 1,300 people so far and is accepting applications at only a few airports. At BWI, the only airport where the agency has replaced all private-sector screeners with federal ones, the transition has taken six weeks and is still not complete.

Speeding that up nationwide depends on intricate cooperation among airports, airlines, the agency's local security directors -- most of whom are not yet hired -- communities and the contractors themselves, said Boeing's Rick Stevens, who runs the unit hired to set up bomb-detection equipment.

On Wednesday, Jackson, TSA chief John W. Magaw and representatives from Boeing and Lockheed met with directors of 10 major airports for about four hours to discuss the agency's rollout plan. Rick Vacar, director of the Houston Airport System, is skeptical of the TSA's ability to meet the deadlines but said he was encouraged by the meeting.

"I'm not saying I've become a believer," Vacar said, but he added that the TSA and the contractors seem "well-organized, [and] they have a game plan that, if executed, seems doable."

TSA officials have said before that they were on the verge of a major ramp-up, only to suffer delays. In late March, for example, Magaw announced that 1,200 people would undergo training to become screener supervisors "during the next four weeks."

Instead, half that number completed the training. The process was halted after two weeks, partly because there were bureaucratic delays in hiring a private contractor to take over training duties.

"I frankly think that they really need to get their act together," one House Democratic staffer said.

Earlier this month, managers of 39 airports urged Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta to abandon the deadline for installing bomb-detection equipment. They argued that a last-minute rush to get the machines into airports would cause havoc and create long lines for passengers.

Douglas R. Laird, former head of security for Northwest Airlines, said meeting the bomb-detection deadline is "a physical impossibility." The TSA already has compromised, he said, by deciding to buy only about half the van-size machines necessary to scan all luggage. It will make up the difference by using trace-detection devices, which are far cheaper but require more people and time to operate.

One source who is familiar with the agency's efforts to meet the deadlines said the TSA is mired in "organizational chaos," as it attempts to create itself while simultaneously trying to make airports safer.

TSA leaders knew from the beginning that their assignment was risky, and it took the unusual step of borrowing high-powered consultants from corporate America.

The consultants -- many of them executives who had helped companies such as FedEx and Marriott roll out major systems -- first came up with a plan that called for taking over 15 airports by mid-April and 25 more in mid-May.

As hiring and contracting efforts took longer than hoped, the plan slipped. TSA briefing documents supplied to Congress in March called for having full federal security forces in 15 airports by June 1.

But soon after those schedules were distributed, the agency decided it hadn't hired enough employees to make the plan happen, a spokesman said.

Now, TSA plans call for staffing two airports by June 25. The rest of the rollout plan is uncertain because the agency is still developing it with Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed is used to taking on big, unwieldy programs for the Pentagon, and Bradley said his company believes it can meet the TSA deadlines.

Boeing chairman and chief executive Philip M. Condit said he has "no illusions" about the difficulty of the task.

"This is going to be a huge challenge to get to the dates that are set -- reasonably artificially, really. There's nothing magic about the end of the year," except that's when Congress said it wanted the job done, Condit said in an interview.

"Are there risks this won't get done? I think the answer is yes, but we're going to do the best job we possibly can and try to meet the deadline," he said.

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