Airline Security: Stuck on the Runway?
Pilots and officials say the skies are as dangerous as ever. Can government do the job? BY SALLY B. DONNELLY

Sunday, Apr. 21, 2002
Phil Messina stood in the aisle of a makeshift airplane cabin set up in a hotel conference room and pulled items from a cardboard box. "I can kill you with a magazine, a soda can, a compact disk, a wine bottle, and a fork," he told an audience of airline pilots. Then Messina, a stocky former cop with a Fu Manchu mustache, began thrusting a 6-in. gold object into the air. "But this is the best!" he boasted. "I bought it yesterday at John F. Kennedy Airport." In his hand was a dagger-sized Statue of Liberty with a knife-sharp torch and crown.

Messina?s demonstration was one of dozens at a security training session held last week in San Diego by the Airline Pilots Association, which represents 60,000 commercial aviators. TIME joined 100 pilots, airline officials and law enforcement agents as lecturers delivered the grim news: Flying is far less secure than the pilots hoped, Congress promised or the traveling public believes. Deadly weapons get onto planes every day. Baggage goes unchecked. "There are fundamental flaws in the government?s approach to airline security," says former Northwest Airlines pilot Stephen Luckey, who heads ALPA?s Security Committee. "They?re worrying about nail clippers, and failing to treat the more significant threats."

More bad news reached the pilots from Washington, where last week Kenneth Mead, the Department of Transportation?s Inspector General, delivered a scathing report to Congress on the Transportation Security Administration — the new agency tasked with protecting commercial aviation. Mead said the TSA would not acquire enough explosive detection machines to screen every bag by Dec. 31, as Congress has mandated. (A TSA spokesman says the agency intends to meet the deadline.) Mead predicted that because of its free-spending ways, the TSA would likely run out of money by next month.

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