Bush Plan For Airline Safety Near
Federal Takeover Appears Unlikely

By Ellen Nakashima and Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 26, 2001; Page A01

The Bush administration moved closer yesterday to assembling a package of measures to improve air passengers' safety, embracing such steps as strengthening cockpit doors and increasing federal oversight for airport baggage screeners, sources said.

But the administration is reluctant to approve a complete federal takeover of airport security operations and is skeptical of the idea of allowing pilots to have firearms in cockpits, the sources said.

Administration officials last night were working on the package with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta briefed Bush and senior advisers yesterday afternoon on several possible actions developed by an aviation task force appointed last week. Bush is expected to announce his package this week, perhaps tomorrow at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

Airlines and airports have pushed for a federal takeover of security since the Sept. 11 hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They argue that they cannot afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to beef up security, especially now that ridership is drastically reduced.

Administration officials are still developing the federal role with regard to luggage screeners -- not making them civil service employees, which would require hiring about 28,000 new federal employees, but using other approaches. Those include strengthening federal oversight of background checks for baggage screeners, enforcing tougher standards for screeners' training and skill levels, and establishing some form of public-private partnership authority for airport security.

A bipartisan coalition of senators introduced legislation Friday that would create a new federal staff of baggage screeners. The idea was that the federal government needed to have direct involvement in a frontline safety function and should not contract out public safety.

Members of the House and Senate were said to be pulling together yesterday behind the idea that air-travel security should come under some form of federal control.

"I'm still not sure what they [the administration] want to do on federalization. I'm not sure whether that means they're working on the details, or they don't want to federalize" the airport security system, said Michael McLaughlin, an aviation staffer for Rep. William O. Lipinski (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation Committee. "But I think there is movement in Congress and in the general public to federalize the whole system."

"The president is committed to improving airline safety," White House Deputy Press Secretary Claire Buchan said, stressing that the options are still under consideration. "He believes that we should work with the airlines and work with the members of Congress."

Bush has already committed to spending $3 billion on airline safety out of the $40 billion Congress approved after the terrorist attacks. The measures he is expected to announce this week are likely to be funded with that money.

The administration is studying short- and long-term solutions to safety challenges. The short-term plan for greater cockpit safety, for instance, would include retrofitting doors to better secure them. The long-term plan would involve a redesign requiring airplanes to have two sets of doors, separated by a walk-in chamber, which cannot be opened simultaneously.

The Air Line Pilots Association union yesterday called for pilots to be allowed to carry weapons on flights. But Buchan said that decision will be left up to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Leaders in both houses said it would be next week before any legislation could be considered. There are too many details to explore to act hastily, several congressional leaders said.

"That's why we couldn't get a bill ready today or tomorrow, because there are legitimate questions in people's minds that need to be answered by professionals," Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said yesterday. "We haven't had time to do that yet, but we're going to try to do it in the next week."

A wide range of experts from the air-travel industry yesterday urged Congress to act. Representatives of airports, flight attendants, airlines and the aerospace industry told Congress that the government must consider -- and fund -- air travel security as a key part of national defense.

Without reliable federal funding, airports might have to cancel critical services or even shut down under a burden of extra security costs that could amount to $1 billion a year, David Z. Plavin, president of the Airports Council International-North America, told the House Transportation aviation subcommittee.

Kenneth M. Mead, the Transportation Department's inspector general, told a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing that airlines were not using $1 million machines designed to detect explosives in airline baggage.

In some cases, he said, the machines had been left in warehouses. Some airlines had installed them but had underused them. "A machine sitting idle is not a powerful exemplar of security," Mead said. He declined to say where the machines were not being used, citing security considerations.

Staff writers Mike Allen and Stephen Barr contributed to this report.