A couple of good ones might be on the market soon, according to the current Administration’s infrastructure budget proposal to sell Washington’s National and Dulles airports in order to privatize a number of these and other federal assets. It turns out that those two airports are under long-term lease until 2067 by the government to the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority, which are physically located across the Potomac River in Virginia. Many other federal properties nationwide would also be on the block, including National Park Service facilities.

Generally, this security focused column tries not to delve into what are presumably business-related or highly politicized issues. However, discussing dumb proposals has always been our stock in trade, so welcome to the fray. You may recall the President’s promises in both the campaign and the State of the Union address to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports…”. Well, as it turns out, he would apparently rather sell them than be responsible for their condition. His recent budget doesn’t provide the wherewithal to do so - cutting $168 billion in infrastructure spending. Instead it urges state and local governments and private industry to absorb such projects without major new federal investments. Then, if things go south, guess who gets the blame. Further, who can afford to buy, operate, and maintain a major airport? Correct: big corporations whose primary responsibility to their stockholders is to turn a profit from their Apex International Airport business venture… until it doesn’t. Then what? Private owners do not respond well to the public interest… that’s one reason they’re rich.

Further, airports are not isolated entities – they are, by definition, an integrated transportation system dependent on a stable and consistent network. If you chose state and local governments to fully fund that national network, you might want to begin stashing away a lot more withholding taxes from your paycheck; new terminals and runways can run a few billion-with-a-B-dollars.

Unaddressed in such a proposal is a multitude of security-related issues. Presumably (but not with any certainty), TSA would remain responsible for passenger and baggage screening, but consider that the cost of physical infrastructure security is 100% business overhead (i.e, non-revenue)– which is, indeed, already borne by the local government police, fire and rescue. When it’s no longer a public interest facility, with a whole new layer of private corporate bureaucracy, unprofitable overhead is the first business cost to be reduced. It’s a lousy idea.

Here’s another bad idea: TSA is cooking the books on the “success” of Pre-Check security. TSA Pre-Check has always been a very good concept: essentially, background checks on the good guys will allow them to speed through the security checkpoint; unknown persons will still get the full Monty. But now, after several years of buildup, Pre-Check membership enrollment has flattened while infrequent traffic continues to increase, so the definition of metrics for success has changed: TSA has taken the typical bureaucratic approach and changed the rules. They no longer measure improved security as a percentage of all travelers, but rather as a percentage of the subset called frequent travelers. Industry expert Ken Dunlap of Catalyst-Go Consultants explains:

“The point of Pre-Check is to buy down risk across the entire aviation system by prescreening as many individual travelers as possible. The more people who volunteer for prescreening, the less of the population that you know nothing about when they reach the checkpoint. So if you know that, say, 25% of the users of your system are eligible for expedited screening, you can design, operate, and purchase a system optimized to that population balance.”

Dunlap’s example:

• Old math: If 100 travelers are standing in line, and 25% of all of these are enrolled in Pre-Check, you have 75 passengers who need the full-monty screening and 25 receiving expedited screening. You have bought down the risk of 25 passengers.
• New math: If 100 travelers are standing in line, and 25% of the frequent travelers are enrolled in Pre-Check, then 94 passengers would still require the full monty (25% of 25= 6). You have only bought down the risk for 6 passengers.

So, the question is, which 25% target is better for aviation security?”