by Greg Schneider, The Washington Post
Many entrances to restricted areas at Dulles International Airport are not staffed by security screeners or equipped with metal detectors, allowing thousands of airport workers to get near planes with only the swipe of an electronic identification card.
Such unsupervised access remains common nationwide, including at Washington’s three airports, experts said. While the enhanced airport security system has so far concentrated on those traveling on planes, intimately screening such items as passengers’ shoes and pilots’ hats, the same level of attention has not yet been given to the scattered “back doors” of airports, aviation authorities said.
A detailed look at Dulles airport illustrates the problems. Ramp workers such as baggage handlers, cargo haulers and caterers often are able to come and go from the most sensitive areas without passing through security checkpoints, where people are screened for explosives or weapons. Doors in remote parts of the terminals, as well as gates in fences surrounding runways, are sometimes protected only by electronic locks.
“There are so many ways to breach security it would make your head spin,” said a Dulles ramp worker, who requested anonymity.
Officials at Dulles and other airports said there are layers of security behind the access system, such as background checks of most employees, automatic logs of who goes through every door and the stepped-up vigilance of other workers.
Pilots and flight attendants said, however, that they do not feel safe. “I think we’re being ignorant, to a degree, or turning a blind eye to the facts,” said Capt. Bob Miller, a pilot for United Parcel Service and president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with the conclusion that if I devote all my resources and attention to one segment [of security] . . . and delay attention [elsewhere] I’m asking for trouble.”
The situation shows how circuitous the issue of improving airport safety is proving to be. Congress told the new Transportation Security Administration to solve the airport access problems, but imposed such aggressive deadlines for hiring federal baggage screeners and installing bomb-detection machines that federal officials say they can focus on little else.
Furthermore, access control and perimeter security have always been handled by individual airports. Local managers, who usually report to an airport authority or other local government agency, recoil at the idea of a federal takeover.
“At least in the initial ramp-up, the more the Transportation Security Administration concentrates on passenger screening and bag screening and doesn’t become overly involved in those other areas, the better for everybody,” said James A. Wilding, president of the Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority, which operates both Dulles and Reagan National airports.
Security is already better because workers know to look out for suspicious behavior, Wilding said. Arriving at the ultimate solutions is going to be expensive and technically demanding.
On Friday, for example, New York Gov. George Pataki announced a plan to race ahead of the Transportation Security Administration and beef up access and perimeter security at that state’s biggest airports. He proposed replacing card-key systems with fingerprint scanners and putting surveillance cameras and motion detectors at entry points. The expected price tag to state taxpayers: $100 million.
Pilots and flight attendants said they worry about the lack of scrutiny given to workers at all three Washington area airports -- Dulles, Reagan National and Baltimore-Washington International.
Alin Boswell, a US Airways flight attendant, said he was riding the employee shuttle to Reagan National recently when a gate agent he has known for years found in her purse a pair of forbidden items -- scissors and a nail file. “I said, oh, do you need to go back to your car? And she said, ‘No, I’ll just go through [baggage claim] downstairs, that way I don’t need to go through security.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
That turns out to be a popular practice, said another Dulles ramp worker, who requested anonymity. He said he often skips the airport’s security checkpoint when he is late for work and cuts through a door in baggage claim.
“If you’re late for work three times you get written up. Instead of taking a chance on getting in trouble and being suspended, you go through the door so you don’t have to go through the security line,” the worker said.
A tour of such public areas at Dulles offers a case study of security issues that have gotten little attention from the government since Sept. 11.
In the baggage claim area, at least one door leads through a luggage-sorting room to the ramp outside, which has direct access to parked planes. That door, which is secured by an electronic lock, is monitored by a guard stationed just outside the door in a chair.
On a recent day, the guard was seen talking with co-workers about 20 feet away, seemingly ignoring the door. Several Dulles employees said the guards routinely leave the post or read newspapers without looking up. Any airport employee with the proper ID badge can open the door.
Dulles ramp workers are supposed to enter through the security checkpoint in the main terminal before going on duty, but there is no way to detect if they skip the search.Several ramp workers said it is easy to pass through the baggage claim door with unauthorized items or even guests.
“If you work here, you know that. Anybody who wants to do something wrong to a plane knows how to get past security without getting caught,” one of the workers said. “If everybody knew what I know, there probably would be a lot less people flying, to be honest about it.”
Keith Meurlin, who manages Dulles for the airports authority, said that the setup is “not absolutely fool-proof.” But, he said, there are a number of safeguards. The guard is supposed to look out for “piggybacks,” or unauthorized people trying to walk through with badge-holders. The card-key system is programmed to let only workers cleared for the baggage area through that door, he said, and it keeps a record whenever they use it.
If any employee is caught misusing the system, the airport will suspend that person’s identification badge, “which makes them unemployable to the airline,” Meurlin said.
Just outside the main terminal is a parking area for high-ranking airport employees. Operations managers for airlines commonly leave their cars in that lot and walk over to a fence gate, where someone in a company vehicle picks them up and drives them inside. They use a badge to open the gate, never going through any security screening.
A number of airlines have trucks or cars inside the restricted area and could bring people in that way, Meurlin acknowledged. But he added that every person in the vehicle has to give an ID badge to a guard who then opens the gate.
While the workers who enter that way avoid being searched for dangerous objects, they are subject to “indirect” screening because of the ID system, Meurlin said.
After Sept. 11 airports were required to run background checks on all employees with access to secure areas. There are roughly 15,000 such employees at Dulles. Meurlin said the airport is about 75 percent through the “Herculean process” of fingerprinting them and checking for criminal history.
Any time an employee quits or is fired, he said, the airline is supposed to instantly delete that person’s badge from the system so it cannot be used to operate the electronic locks. He said the airport periodically checks companies’ files to make sure that only current employees have badges.
One vast section of Dulles airport, the cargo-handling area, has no means at all of searching employees who work in secure zones near airplanes. Each commercial airline and several cargo-only companies, such as Federal Express and DHL, have freight processing buildings that can be entered via electronic lock and that open directly onto the ramp where planes are sitting.
While only cargo planes are parked in that area, pilots point out that many of those aircraft are as big as passenger jets and could wreak just as much havoc if a terrorist were to fly one into a target on the ground.
Cargo-handling employees also regularly venture to the passenger side of the airport to load freight onto commercial flights.
The federal airport security law passed last November requires the Transportation Security Administration to come up with a way to search ramp workers for dangerous items, but it set no deadlines. For now, these employees are subject only to the indirect screening represented by their ID badges, including the same background checks as other airport employees.
To get to the passenger side of the airport, Meurlin said, the cargo workers have to pass through a gate opened with the swipe of a badge. Cargo badges are a different color from those issued to workers on the passenger side of the airport. Employees are told to notify supervisors any time they see someone with an improper badge, and the airport regularly runs spot tests to check if workers are paying attention, Meurlin said.
Yet another section of Dulles features no security checkpoints, even for passengers: the general aviation area, where numerous corporations and private individuals base their small planes.
Signature Aviation runs a polished terminal for such fliers, complete with snack bar and shoeshine stand. Passengers and pilots walk through to the taxiway, opening sliding doors either by operating a card-key lock or at the touch of a button by a Signature employee. There are no metal detectors or security screeners, and none are required by the new security law.
While that terminal is some distance from the main passenger terminal, both share the same runways. Workers can move back and forth, though general aviation employees are identified by specific badge colors.
Flight crews on big commercial jets, all of whom must go through the same security screening as their passengers, said the lack of attention to vast segments of airport workers is a dangerous loophole, not only at Dulles but at airports all over the country.
“It’s a very important issue,” said Patricia A. Friend, president of the trade union the Association of Flight Attendants. “Our reading of the aviation security act is that anyone with access to airports or aircraft is required to have the same level of screening as passengers, and we don’t believe they’re getting it.”
Friend raised the concern last week in a meeting with Transportation Security Administration chief John W. Magaw. “What was really clear to us in our conversation with him . . . is that it’s an incredibly overwhelming task to build this brand new agency with a huge work force,” she said.
A Transportation Security Administration official said the agency has staff groups analyzing cargo security and perimeter security, as well as creating a system to standardize ID badges for airport workers and flight crews nationwide.
“At this point, all ideas are on the table,” said the official, who requested anonymity.
But overriding all such concerns are deadlines set by Congress for getting federal baggage screeners into all 429 U.S. airports by Nov. 19, and bomb-detection machines installed by the end of the year, according to congressional staffers.
During a recent briefing on Capitol Hill, a congressional staff member said, Transportation Security Administration officials listed their top five overall priorities: screener recruitment, screener training, bomb-detection machines, a rollout plan for setting up shop in all airports, and beefing up a passenger screening computer system.
“Clearly what they’re working on is passenger screening,” the staff member said.
That is fine with individual airport managers, who want to retain their autonomy and said they are better equipped than before Sept. 11 to monitor their own employees. Background checks are more thorough, and employees are far more aware of the need to report suspicious activity, said Wilding of the Washington airports authority.
“There is definitely room for improvement,” Wilding said. “I think all of us are finding our way into an entirely new security regime, and I don’t think any of us feel like we have it totally figured out yet. . . . But we feel like we are able to do a much, much better job being sure people who are out and about on the airfield really ought to be there.”