Feds launch X-ray project at SFO

Air cargo to undergo closer inspection and screening efforts.

It's almost five years since the Sept. 11 hijackings and 22 years since a bomb hidden amongst cargo downed a U.S. airliner.

But with undiminished fanfare Monday, authorities of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the city of San Francisco signed an agreement for experiments to X-ray more air cargo and sniff it for explosives.

San Francisco International airport chief John Martin called it a "historic project," with the airport chosen as first in the nation for an attempt at giving air cargo the same high level of screening as checked luggage, while producing a six-fold increase in the volume of cargo flowing on time.

What scientists learn at SFO is expected to be adopted by the nation's other major airports that fall under federal security rules and handle the $4 billion a year in air-cargo business. Federal officials said they selectedSFO because the airport had high levels of passenger and cargo traffic yet was well run, and because the project had the backing of the mayor and California's lawmakers in Congress.

Airline passengers have removed their shoes and offered themselves and their belongings for weapons checks, but Mayor Gavin Newsom said federal aviation security so far has neglected the tons of cargo stowed in the belly of the planes.

"To me it's important and fundamental: What lies beneath is what we should be worried about," Newsom said. "I'm excited we're reconciling a huge gap, the one that every time I get on a plane worries me the most."

About 530,000 tons of air cargo flow through a dozen passenger and cargo airlines at SFO a year, about one-twelfth of the 6 billion tons moving nationally. Shippers, handlers and the airlines are responsible for examining that cargo at multiple levels, but many of the checks amount to inspecting the exterior of packages for leaking substances, wires or other indicators according to rules established by the private companies themselves.

Authorities at the U.S. Transportation Security Administration won't say exactly how much of the contents of air cargo is examined, either by hand or machine. They say most individual packages placed into passenger airliners are screened by machines with spot checking by bomb-sniffing dogs. But a large amount of air cargo is packed in pallets or large containers that are too large for airport X-ray machines to handle.

Congress last year set aside $30 million for a pilot screening program for air cargo and ordered the Transportation Security Administration to start it at three airports. The experiments at SFO, the first and largest airport chosen, will take about half of the money.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, aided by colleagues at Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest labs, have been studying the screening system used by SFO's airlines and in October will replace it.

A team of subcontractors will replace the two to four cargo screeners at each airline and start running more, and larger, cargo through huge X-ray machines and swap-type explosive detectors, with spot and backup checking by bomb dogs, according to Howard Hall, a Livermore lab chemist and leader of the air cargo explosives detection pilot program.

"Hopefully what we're doing will be no slower than what the airlines already do," Hall said. "It really comes down to how much you are willing to spend for technology and work force, and how much delay you are willing to tolerate. We're going to get hard answers to those questions."

Besides the difficulty of X-raying large air-cargo containers, federal homeland security officials moved slower on air cargo than with passengers and checked baggage partly because of a competing proposal to harden the cargo holds and partly because of a theory that al Qaida was not really interested in blowing up airplanes, according to Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and homeland-security expert at the Brookings Institution.

"There's been an assumption all along that this branch of al Qaida wants to do dramatic things, at least as dramatic as they have in the past. So to bomb an airplane is not as dramatic as what they want to do in the future," O'Hanlon said. "To the extent this assumption might be prevalent, I think it might be wrong and dangerous."

The Bush administration also has been hesitant to impose rules on dealings between corporations, O'Hanlon said, and so has held back from imposing security regulations on shippers and airlines in the air cargo trade, unlike between individual passengers and the airlines.

Inside Bay Area