By James Pilcher
The Cincinnati Enquirer

HEBRON - Airports across America, including Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International, will start using machines to look for bombs in passengers luggage after midnight tonight, as federal transportation security officials said Monday they would meet a legal deadline to scan all checked bags for explosives.

That idea was proposed after the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland 14 years ago this month and pursued with new zeal after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Federal officials say that 90 percent of all bags will be scanned electronically, with the remainder to be checked through other means such as bomb-sniffing dogs or hand searches..

"Job done," James T. Loy, head of the Transportation Security Administration, which now oversees aviation security nationwide, said Monday. "Meeting the 36th - and final - deadline that Congress set for the TSA is a huge accomplishment.."

But many aviation security experts and airport officials worry that the rush to beat the year-end deadline for bag screening could be creating new problems, such as:

A need to go back and install equipment a second time to replace temporary solutions with permanent ones. That can get expensive for airports and the federal government. (This will happen, for example, at the local airport's busiest terminal - the one operated by Delta Air Lines - because there aren't enough of the permanent machines available.)

The reliance on technology that will need to be updated when intelligence suggests that terrorists are using new types of explosives.

And, perhaps most important, a high false alarm rate by the machines. This could cause chaos with airline baggage handling systems and wreak havoc with airline schedules, thereby turning even more people away from an already staggering industry.

Nationally, airlines handle up to 2 million bags a day. The local rate can be as high as 100,000 daily, although approximately two-thirds of those pieces are connecting through the hub and would have been scanned elsewhere.

Robert Monetti's son Richard was on board Pan Am 103, on which terrorists planted a bomb inside a transistor radio. That device exploded on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 259 passengers and crew and another 11 on the ground.

Mr. Monetti is president of the Pan Am 103 survivor's association. - a critic of and sometime advisor to federal aviation officials.

"I guess the polite word for what is going on is `stupid,'" he said. "From what I've seen, the machines themselves do a pretty good job of what is asked of them. But there has been no prioritizing, and that has meant a scattershot approach that could be leaving some holes."

Machines behind the scenes

Terry Burgess, who oversees the TSA's operations at the local airport, and other TSA officials won't get too specific about local and national bag scanning plans.

One thing is certain here, at the nation's 24th busiest airport: All the scanning will take place after passengers check their bags at the counter or with a skycap.

In previous presentations to the Kenton County Airport Board, airport employees have said that Terminals 1 and 2 will be getting two medium-sized Explosive Detection System (EDS) machines apiece, and that they will be installed "behind the scenes."

Terminal 3, through which Delta Air Lines operates its second-largest hub and which can generate as many as 1,500 bags an hour, will use a short-term solution of smaller trace detection machines, also operated behind the scenes.

Unlike the larger EDS machines, which use CAT scan technology that looks for certain molecular densities, trace machines require someone to swipe the bag in question with a cotton swab and then analyze it.

The long-term plan calls for six or more larger EDS machines to be installed in the belly of the Delta terminal, but that many machines are not yet available. The TSA won't say when those machines will eventually be delivered.

Only two companies have been certified to make the machines, and an executive with one of those firms says that only half the needed machines have been made so far.

"We would have had to make them two to three times as fast as we have if we wanted to fill all the orders the government placed" by the deadline, said David Pillor, senior vice president for sales and marketing for Newark, Calif.-based InVision Technologies.

Even Mr. Pillor acknowledges that the machines sound a false alarm 25 percent of the time or more, and that's down from the 50 percent rate that models had in the early 1990s. Items such as chocolate, bath salts and peanut butter are known to trigger an alarm.

And experts say that could cause all kinds of problems, especially with systems installed behind the scenes, as Cincinnati's will be.

"One in four bags, that's not a small number, especially at some of the larger hub airports," said David Schlothauer, chairman of Cincinnati-based aviation and airport consulting firm Parsons Brinckerhoff Aviation.

Parsons Brinckerhoff has been working with six major airports on the issue, including Los Angeles International, which recently installed its own behind-the-scenes EDS system.

Airport officials also have said that a second search, if necessary, would be done with a trace detection device to quickly rule out nonthreats. But Mr. Schlothauer and others argue even that will bog down the system, meaning delays and missed connections.

Mr. Pillor also says that planned improvements to EDS machines themselves don't come from upgrades in the actual hardware. Rather, the machines are constantly updated with new information on what to look for, meaning that programmers are constantly in a game of catch-up with new intelligence on the kinds of explosives being used by terrorists.

"So they still haven't come up with a foolproof way to stop getting explosives on planes," Mr. Monetti said.

Searching bags

Behind-the-scenes searches raise other issues, especially what happens if there is a problem with a bag - because they now all must be unlocked.

The TSA will not say exactly what the protocol will be if a bag needs to be opened, only that if a bag is damaged by federal screeners or if something is missing, reimbursement will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Agency officials also say they are installing video cameras to document any time a bag needs to be opened, but they would not confirm whether this procedure would be in place either locally or nationally by today.

But local airport officials say they have not been asked to use the airport's three bomb-sniffing dogs if there is any question.

Local officials are glad to have the searches out of the sight of passengers - because they did not want to create extra lines in what are already cramped terminal lobbies. The size of some of the machines, which can be as big and weigh as much as a large pickup truck, might have pushed some waiting passengers outside the terminals.

"We were already hearing that some passengers were going to smaller airports to avoid hassles," said Chad Everett, deputy director of operations for the local airport, who also oversees security issues for the airport administration. "And we wanted our ticket counter to operate like a ticket counter and our lobby to operate like a lobby."

E-mail jpilcher@enquirer.com

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