And I’m not particularly surprised. I don’t mean to demean the good men and women in the program, some of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with on another program, but the DHS Acting Inspector General recently told a Senate session that the $803 million FAM budget is disproportionate to its role in aviation security. Translation: too little bang for too many bucks. In my view, it’s a bit like the Behavior Detection Officer (BDO) program - a potentially good idea at the time of 9/11 because we weren’t really sure of the scope, size or origin of the threat, so better safe than sorry.
I won’t grumble further on the BDOs here – there was no scientific foundation for the criteria, and selection of a potential threat was deemed by most professional observers as no better than a coin toss. I meet seven of their criteria just walking in the door... eight, if you count a bad attitude. However, the Federal Air Marshals (FAM) has existed in some form since FAA’s “Cuban hijacking” days to meet an identifiable and demonstrably credible threat at the time. Recall that air travel in those days was a much more genteel experience with a lot less aircraft and passengers who wore a proper suit and tie, and no such thing as a CT or AIT scanner that sees your every bodily anomaly and carefully packed fetish for the checkpoint screener to display to the entire queue.
There was also a recent New York Times story suggesting significant alcohol and drug-abuse problems among FAMs – it’s quite boring to simply ride all day, almost every day, back and forth, and rumor has it there are now sobriety checks. I’m not giving away any secrets to note there are not FAMs on every flight, every day... there is a methodology to the scheduling, based largely on intelligence gathering as well as an “informed” random factor; that is, a reason to cover “X” route instead of “Y” today.
There was a recent cost-effectiveness study in the journal Risk Analysis which compared FAMs, armed pilots and hardened cockpit doors. Their analysis assessed the criteria to justify the cost-effectiveness of each measure if a terrorist attack occurs (not just a threat): FAMs would need to encounter more than 2 terrorist events per year; armed pilots, one every 50 years; hardened doors, one every 200 years to justify the current cost of their programs.
Admittedly, there does not appear to be any security consideration other than cost. I don’t know the statistical values used to come to those conclusions, but if we even cut them in half, it seems the enormous advances in technology already in place, and more coming, such as 3D scanners at the checkpoint, are having the largest security impact; and would be the logical use of TSA’s limited resources.
