The grace period for air travel has ended.
Gone are the days of good will after the Sept. 11 attacks, when passengers, airlines and airports were willing to put up with all kinds of intrusive and time-consuming security measures. Gone, too, are the months when carriers desperately wooed frightened travelers by catering to their needs and when well-intentioned federal officials optimistically laid out new safety plans.
Now, airlines and airports are vigorously lobbying the government to scale back or modify many of the new safeguards. Passengers are clamoring for more consistent and less exasperating security procedures. And airlines are cutting back on passenger services and creating ticket restrictions they would not have dared put in place before last fall.
Hartsfield Atlanta International, the world’s busiest airport, is grappling with many of the industry’s issues a full year after the terrorists struck, transforming air travel more than any aspect of daily life. The airport serves as a hub for Delta Air Lines, the nation’s third-largest carrier, and AirTran Airways, a fast-growing low-fare carrier.
Hartsfield also became a symbol last November for the potentially nightmarish future of air travel, when the entire airport was shut for four hours because a passenger ran down an up-escalator to retrieve a camera bag.
No single industry was hit harder by the attacks than the airlines, which have lost about $10 billion in the last year. Business travelers are shunning expensive tickets, and only low-cost carriers like AirTran are making money again. Delta lost $1.3 billion in the last three quarters, while AirTran lost $12.1 million. In the most recent quarter, Delta lost $10.80 per thousand available seat miles, while AirTran made $3.40.
Besides resorting to drastic cost-cutting efforts to stay aloft, the airlines ﾗ along with airports like Hartsfield ﾗ are in a heated dispute with the 10-month-old Transportation Security Administration over what security measures should be trimmed because they are driving away passengers. Still, many people blame the airlines’ hiring of cheap security contractors for the lax procedures before Sept. 11, and some experts say that several streamlining ideas by the carriers, like hastily creating a “trusted traveler” program to speed passengers and employees through checkpoints, could be costly and cumbersome.
The airlines are openly resentful of security measures that they say have scared away customers, especially on short-haul flights.
“The T.S.A. has the best intentions in the world,” said Frederick W. Reid, Delta’s president. “But unless you keep the law enforcement focus and add customer service and efficiency to it, you will kill aviation.”
Delta has been one of the most outspoken airlines about scrapping certain security procedures, like searching carry-on bags at the boarding gate. The chief executive, Leo F. Mullin, made several trips to Washington over the summer to talk with federal officials about overhauling parts of the system. He is pushing for the government to drop, among other things, a security tax of $2.50 a flight leg that was added to tickets in February.
In addition, the airlines have told the government that they will not pay $750 million that federal officials had requested of them for next year’s security budget. The industry actually came up with that figure last winter when Congress asked it for an estimate of certain security costs, but the airlines have since said they will pay only $300 million.
The companies have also banded together to support the idea of a “trusted traveler” card. Adm. James M. Loy, head of the federal security agency, said yesterday at a Senate hearing that he backed the concept. But such a program should be put in place slowly, some security experts say, and it could be costly for the taxpayer. Moreover, any watering down of current procedures ﾗ including removing random checks ﾗ could have dire consequences.
“I think the industry is being shortsighted if in fact that is their view,” said Jeff Schlanger, chief operating officer of security services at Kroll Associates, an international risk assessment company. “A decrease of security in airports during preboarding might inevitably lead to additional situations.”
Many experts agree that security is better now than a year ago but still has a long way to go before being truly effective. Mr. Schlanger recommended that guards be taught how to ask more probing questions of passengers and to watch for suspicious behavior.
George Novak, an airline safety consultant and program director at the Aviation Institute at George Washington University, said bag searches at the gate should be kept for now because there is a chance a bag could be switched or tampered with after the security checkpoint. But truly efficient measures will come only as technology slowly improves, allowing the government to use facial recognition, iris scans and rapid database searches to check passengers, he said.
Throughout the summer, embarrassing incidents revealed that people were still able to smuggle weapons past security guards, sometimes at airports where federal workers had already replaced contractors. On Aug. 25, a woman with a loaded .357-caliber handgun in her carry-on bag walked past private screeners in Atlanta and boarded a plane. The gun was found by guards in Philadelphia, where the woman was trying to catch a connecting flight.
Nearly 66 million passengers came through Hartsfield from September 2001 to July, a figure down more than 10 percent from the period the previous year. The airport is set up so almost all fliers go through a single security checkpoint with multiple screening gates. Lines in the weeks after last fall’s attacks stretched hundreds of feet, with waits sometimes an hour or more.
Following advice from consultants, the airport created a single serpentine line that winds back on itself more than a dozen times, and the number of screening gates at the main checkpoint will be expanded to 20 from 18. Ben DeCosta, general manager of the airport, said waiting times were down to 10 minutes in slack periods, but waits of up to 20 minutes still occur at very busy times.
Travelers in Atlanta one recent afternoon had widely varying opinions on the new state of security.
“It’s appropriate, definitely appropriate,” said Joseph Rubano, a sales representative from New Jersey. “I’ll take any hassle.”
Caroline Britt, a retired research librarian from Oklahoma, said: “It seems I always get picked to take my shoes off. It’s always the old grandmas.”
John Kylen, a computer network manager for the Kansas Air National Guard, said, “I’d be better off with a Wal-Mart greeter.”
