U.S. air passengers face increased security

National Guard troops deployed
Other security measures were also ramped up at airports. Governors in Massachusetts, California and New York sent National Guard troops to major airports in their states. Search dogs and officers carrying machine guns still patrolled the Miami airport Friday.

At Boston’s Logan Airport, weary National Guardsmen were one of the few signs anything was different Friday morning.

The last time members of the National Guard were deployed at Logan was October 2001, after two flights from the airport hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The guard’s mission ended in March 2002.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney told about 50 guard members at the airport that he didn’t expect this mission to be as lengthy: Only “until TSA and the airlines can get their resources up to a level where they can handle the gate-check area ... and you’ll be able to return home to your families and to your regular jobs.”

‘The hassle factor’
While plots to blow up airliners using liquid explosives are nothing new — such an attempt was foiled more than a decade ago — the government has been slow to upgrade its security equipment at airport checkpoints so that it can detect explosives on passengers.

Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley said the need to tighten security came as a surprise and the changes were difficult to implement.

“It normally takes us about four weeks to roll out a change at a security checkpoint, and this one came about in a little bit more than four hours in the middle of last night,” Hawley said.

Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, said the government was overreacting. “They paralyzed the system with the hassle factor again,” Woerth said.

During the first few hours of the alert, the TSA was taking toiletries away from flight crews, he said. “Then they said, ‘This is stupid. We’re taking toothpaste away from the guy who’s going to fly the plane.’ It didn’t take them long to back down.”

But Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, said it makes sense to insert “uncertainty and randomness into the system so we can’t let the adversary game the system.”

Still, he said, coordination among agencies and the industry remains a problem.

‘Nightmarish procedures’
Denis Breslin, spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union, faulted nagging communication shortcomings among intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies.

“There’s a whole lot of people making rules up right now, and until they get it all sorted out, every passenger is going to have to go through the nightmarish procedures that they’re putting together right now,” Breslin said.

David Mackett, a pilot who heads the Airline Pilots Security Alliance, said flight crews are treated as part of the problem.

“We’re not happy that every time there’s a threat we find out from the media, and that there’s almost a complete vacuum of information when it comes to the air crews,” Mackett said.

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