The Obama administration has taken appropriate short-term steps to enhance security screening, but more needs to be done to create the best system. More security does not have to be cumbersome for travelers. Our leaders continue to be intent on revising our existing security system, rather than focusing on a comprehensive, holistic approach to create the world’s best air travel security system.

We need a wholesale review of the security process that balances effective means to identify the small number of individuals who mean us harm, while enabling the hundreds of millions of legitimate travelers to and within the United States to have confidence and be able to move through the system in a timely manner. Travel is essential to the health of our economy. Nearly 60 million annual international visitors -- more than 30 million of whom travel by air -- spent $110 billion in 2008 and were responsible for nearly 1 million American jobs.

U.S. Travel’s vision for the future of air travel includes a process that has the best intelligence analysis, the best screening technology and appropriate resources to move people through airports effectively and efficiently. Israel is widely regarded as the model. Why can’t we do even better?

We are calling on the Administration, DHS and Congress to conduct a wholesale review of the current screening process with an audit of existing technology as well as developing technologies that make travel screening safer, considerate of individual privacy and less cumbersome for the traveler. Unallocated stimulus funding could expedite this process.

The TSA, as constituted, contains a built-in conflict of interest in that the agency is both the transportation security policymaker/regulator AND the provider of one major component of airport security, namely passenger and baggage screening. That kind of dual role leads to tendency to protect one’s own, while being more objective about demanding performance from those the agency regulates at arm’s length. For example, both the GAO and the DHS Inspector General’s office have periodically deployed red-teams to try to get banned objects past airport screening. They usually succeed. But have any heads rolled at TSA? Not as far as is publicly known.

Another consequence of TSA’s role as the provider of airport screening is the creation of divided security responsibilities at airports. The airport—as regulate—is responsible for lobby security, tarmac security, perimeter control, access control, etc. But the TSA is responsible for screening. It’s hard to have a seamless, well-integrated security approach with this kind of fragmented responsibility. A good example is the recent fiasco at Newark over surveillance of the exit area.

In researching a policy paper last year for the OECD’s International Transport Forum, I compared the airport security regimes in the USA, Canada, and the EU countries. Nowhere else did I find either the TSA kind of built-in conflict of interest or the fragmented airport security. In Europe, each country has a national aviation security policymaker/regulator, but the provision of airport security is the responsibility of each airport. At least for the larger airports in nearly all countries (the only ones for which I could find data), the airports have chosen to outsource the screening function to specialized security companies that must comply with national security directives. Canada created an entity called CATSA to organize airport screening, but it is not the policymaker/regulator (Transport Canada does that); moreover, CATSA outsources all airport screening to private security firms.

Security contractor firms in all of these cases appear to be held more accountable for performance than the TSA holds its own screening workforce. Outsourcing this function also permits much greater flexibility, to increase or decrease screener numbers in response to the dynamics of the airline business. And in Canada, it has allowed companies to offer significantly higher compensation to attract screeners in the oil patch of Alberta, since the contractors are not required to follow uniform, nationwide compensation rules. Longer-term, having outsourced screening means that if and when either the threat or the technology changes significantly, it will be easier to downsize the whole operation, rather than having it become a kind of Maginot Line soaking up limited security resources that could be better spent on other uses.

You can find my OECD/IFT paper online:

www.internationaltransportforum.org/jtrc/DiscussionPapers/DP200823.pdf

I am tired of this question and others like it because it begins with a great many assumptions that are rooted in impossible expectations and a perfect world that will never exist. Before we (again) begin to discuss aviation security we need to reset the ground rules and national mindset.

1. Being alive means you are at risk. Americans in particular have arrived at some esoteric point that assumes nothing should go wrong—and if it does, someone else is at fault and should pay. In Europe they are amused that our microwave containers bother to remind us that upon removal “contents may be hot”. Go hiking in most of the world and there is a tacit agreement that by getting on the trail, one assumes a certain amount of responsibility for one’s capacities and welfare. In the US we either shut down the trail or post enough warnings to fill a good-sized book.

That mindset is hugely manifest in our approach to security, in that outlandish and ridiculous parameters are generally put in place as a knee-jerk crisis response, with little forethought. And, once in place, those urging a more logical process are seen as “putting the American people at risk”. Furthermore, any kind of true cost-benefit evaluation is rarely undertaken. So, we do things because that is how we do things rather than because they have been shown useful.

2. We put ourselves at risk all the time. We get in and out of our cars multiple times without considering that the risk of death or injury is far higher while driving. Nor does driving discourage phoning, texting, reading or any of the countless activities that have been shown to be downright lethal while behind the wheel.

We engage in sports without proper protective gear and sometimes in direct defiance of our abilities or physical condition. We allow people with either criminal histories or mental imbalance to purchase weapons that outgun law enforcement, and then excuse disaster by blaming the porous system.

In truth, all of us engage daily in activities that carry far more risk than boarding an airplane. And we do it without any real angst or demand to be kept safe. (Step away from the chips, please.)

3. People willing to trade their lives for a cause have an enormous advantage. We who value life demand to be always protected from those who don’t, and that is an unequal equation if ever there was one. Some suggest we move check-in facilities to remote locations and then transfer passengers to terminals. This does a marvelous job of moving the risk to the new location because the bomber’s goal is to cause maximum damage. Where that happens is unimportant as long as the derivative goal of increased fear and havoc is achieved.

4. Passengers are not the enemy but the defenders. Again on Christmas, passengers spotted the danger and responded. Interestingly, under the “sit down” rule, the passengers responding would have been guilty of getting up at an unapproved moment. The bomber, while still culpable, would at least have remained seated. I am constantly amazed that some carriers still circle the trolleys each time a crew member exits the cockpit, showing the passengers just how dangerous they are to safe flight operation and ignoring their demonstrated role as the last line of defense.

5. Truly dangerous plans and people do most of their work long before boarding. And, as we now know, 9/11 and the Christmas Day event were preceded by numerous suspicious activities and outright clues. The real weapon was the plan and its implementation. The physical implements, whether box-cutters or explosives, were merely props in a drama that had been written earlier.

6. They may not have won, but the bad guys have left a huge mark. They have instilled irrational fear, created a monumental and questionable bureaucracy, cost billions, and made us unwilling to a) challenge systems and programs with marginal value and b) admit that no plan, program or agency will ever be able to guarantee our absolute safety.

Once we as a nation have reset our expectations and overcome our fears we can then ask the question and hope for a better outcome.