Before the events of Sept. 11, air travelers might have thought security personnel at airport checkpoints worked for the government. The airlines, maybe. Or they may have guessed the local airport authority.
The truth is, under Federal Aviation Administration guidelines, the airlines are responsible for airport security - but they bid the job out to private security firms. So, how does the system grade out and should travelers feel secure? And, if not, what are the holes in the system and why have they gone uncorrected?
Armed with a laundry list of questions, CNN.com embarked on a computer-assisted reporting project that produced the four-part series "Flight Risk" (www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/flight.risk/index.html). The Web site contracted with Denise Prodigo-Herrmann, former Atlanta Journal-Constitution database editor, to clean up the data and oversee its analysis. We also performed extensive searches of government and aviation Web sites, which proved helpful in providing context and leading us to earlier critical reports submitted to Congress.
A 2000 report from the General Accounting Office was of particular interest, revealing that the starting salary for security screeners at 14 of the nation's 18 largest airports was $6 or less an hour (www.gao.gov click on Airport Security under GAO Reports). The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.
Saddled with low wages, entire airport security teams - considered one of the most crucial jobs in assuring passenger safety - routinely turn over at least once a year.
Watchdogs had identified this extraordinary turnover as a dangerous shortcoming, though offering little or no statistical support. In a bid to do so, we took the GAO turnover rates for the individual airports and compared them with security breaches reported by the FAA during the same 12-month period ending April 1999.
Breaking security
Our analysis revealed that at major airports experiencing a more than 200 percent annual turnover rate - like Lambert in St. Louis, Hartsfield in Atlanta and O'Hare in Chicago - screeners detected a smaller percentage of security breaches. And at airports with lower turnover, screeners uncovered more security violations.
The CNN.com computer-assisted analysis of FAA enforcement data from 1991 to 2000 also found:
The top 10 carriers incurred $13.13 million in FAA fines since 1998, fines which critics say have done little to fix security shortcomings. Logan International Airport in Boston, Dulles in Virginia and Newark International - the originating points for the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings - have some of the lowest number of weapons caught by the airline screeners as a percentage of all reported security violations at each airport. American Airlines, one of the carriers whose planes were hijacked on Sept. 11, was cited for the most security incidents in the decade. Delta Air Lines was second, and United Airlines, the other carrier whose planes were hijacked, had the third-highest number of incidents. Combined, American and United airlines have paid more than $5 million in FAA fines during the past three years.
Our six-week project produced nine stories under the sub-heads: The System, Previous Warnings, Comparing U.S. to Europe and Solutions. Kevin Drew edited the project, while designer Emily Chen worked with Ann Hoevel developing graphics, charts and images.
Because CNN.com isn't hamstrung by space limitations of a daily newspaper, we were able to effectively support our stories with extensive graphics and charts. We were able to take the top 10 airlines and break down their security breaches on a year-by-year basis over the last decade. The same was done with the nation's top 25 airports, where we further detailed the weapons violations at each of the airports.
Critics of the security system had accused the FAA of perpetuating a system of levying fines when breaches are found rather than seeking harsher corrective measures for the airlines. We chose to profile one of the leading security providers, Atlanta-based Argenbright, while also examining the fines assessed by the FAA against the airlines over the past three years (www.faa.gov/agc/enforcement).
Different approach
Several media organizations also were analyzing FAA data in the wake of Sept. 11, but Prodigo-Herrmann followed a slightly different approach for CNN.com.
While the data came with detailed record layouts, some data within specific fields were hard to decipher, specifically security descriptions. Despite numerous requests from NICAR, the FAA refused to unveil details about the data. The NICAR listserv was flooded with commentary from journalists around the country on the complexity of the security code definitions. Prodigo-Herrmann focused her analysis on weapons or violations actually detected by screeners as opposed to an analysis of weapons that screeners missed in FAA tests of the system.
Mike Fish can be reached by e-mail at Mike.Fish@turner.com