Screening 100 Percent of Cargo May Not Be Necessary

Air Safety Week,  Oct 3, 2005  

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A new air cargo security system under development by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) advisory group would require only "elevated risk" air parcels to be screened. But the working group developing the system has not revealed how cargo will receive this designation. Completely random screening would go out the door.

Pilots, the travelling public and many lawmakers are worried that anything short of 100 percent cargo screening would pose too high a risk to safety. But such a system would certainly be less burdensome - and less costly - for airlines, the shipping industry and cargo screeners.

The "Freight Assessment System" (FAS) is slowly emerging from a working group of the TSA's Aviation Security Advisory Committee (ASAC), which most recently met Sept. 22 in Arlington, Va. The Freight Assessment Working Group is not proposing that the new system replace any other TSA cargo security initiative already in place, such as the "Known Shipper" program. Everyone working on developing FAS insists that it is intended as another layer in the nation's cargo security efforts. So even if the system succeeds in not screening all cargo, chances are that there will still be plenty of paperwork.

But there are also a couple of catches before the system can be implemented. First, the FAS development and testing process is dragging on longer than expected, which gives proponents of 100-percent cargo screening -- U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) being chief among them -- a chance to get to the finish line first. While nothing much has happened with the 100-percent provision that Markey reintroduced last spring as H.R. 2044, every month that goes by without an alternative strengthens the hand of Markey and his bipartisan group of co-sponsors. Even if FAS does manage to debut first, it may eventually be overtaken by a 100-percent regulation.

The second catch is that nobody outside of the small number of TSA officials and air carrier representatives who make up the FAS working group has any clue as to how cargo will be designated as "elevated risk." And it's taking a long time to figure that out, says aviation safety advocate Mark Weiss, an American Airlines [AMR] pilot and a member of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations (CAPA).

CAPA backs the 100-percent solution proposed by Markey, as does Weiss, mostly because no other concrete effort is under way to actually screen cargo. "My bottom line, as a captain with a planeload of passengers, is wanting to know the aircraft is as safe as possible, other than just through a paper trail," Weiss said.

In part, FAS's rollout has fallen prey to all the administrative changes at TSA, Weiss added. In fact, on Sept. 28 TSA head Kip Hawley announced a few more such changes. TSA's revolving door, even at its mid-management level, means that staff constantly have to get reeducated on programs like FAS that have been on the drawing board for some time.

The FAS working group is headed by two TSA officials and is part of ASAC, which is comprised mostly of air carrier representatives. By press time, neither TSA nor members of the FAS working group had responded to repeated requests for comment.

Earlier this year, the FAS rollout suffered a major setback when the working group decided that, rather than proceed from concept to pilot program, there would be an intervening "proof of concept" phase, Steve Alterman, president of the Cargo Airline Association (CAA) and a working group member, told ASAC on Sept. 22.

So, instead of subjecting FAS to a real-world tryout at some airport sites, it appears that the air cargo industry will simply supply some cargo data to the working group so it can somehow evaluate how well FAS would identify elevated risk cargo in a real-world setting. And, as of this date, the "proof of concept" itself was still in the planning stages.

The proof of concept will "conclude with a review of lessons learned and recommendations for a path forward," the FAS working group asserts. To some, that sounds like several congressional bills mandating 100 percent cargo screening would have enough time to pass in the interim.

If it is properly designed and does get off the ground, however, FAS may prove to be an efficient way for safety and security officials to know exactly what gets loaded onto aircraft. The working group's descriptions of the system are still a bit vague, but the group promises that it will start by collecting data from air carriers "at earlier points in the supply chain." Then, the system's risk-assessment model will weigh the threats of individual shipments "based on both individual data elements as well as their interrelationships," and relay these conclusions in real-time to shipping points such as airports' ramp areas.

Most significantly, FAS could pull the rug out from under proposals like Markey's to put every single package past some type of scanner.