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By Suzanne Smalley
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While she served as inspector general of the Federal Aviation Administration, Mary Schiavo earned the nickname "Scary Mary" for her repeated warnings about flight safety. In 1996, Schiavo quit her post in protest, after she infuriated Congress and the Clinton administration by telling the public that she "wouldn't fly ValuJet." Her warning came even as her boss, former Transportation secretary Federico Pena, was telling a country shaken by the company's devastating Florida Everglades crash that the airline was safe. Today, Schiavo looks like a visionary. Still outspoken, Schiavo remains appalled by airport security in this country. This week, she spoke with NEWSWEEK's Suzanne Smalley.
NEWSWEEK: Why hasn't the FAA done a better job of airport and airline security?
Mary Schiavo: It's mainly money. Right from the inception of our federal aviation oversight agencies, literally from the '20s when they were just founded with the purpose of promoting the airlines. [FAA regulators] very openly told me that they believed that their job was also to watch out for the airlines' bottom lines. Everything that got put on the table got the cost-benefit analysis. That meant that if the cost of a rule change did not amount to less than the cost of the lives saved, valued at $2.7 million each, plus the cost of the plane, then it wasn't worth it.
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And they were open about that with you?
Inside the department they said those things. Outside they always said that [new safety measures] aren't necessary, that we haven't had a major domestic terrorist attack and, therefore, we don't need these levels of security. In the very last meeting I had as inspector general with the FAA on July 3, 1996, they said that the cost of Pan Am 103 was $3 billion and if we had to make airports completely safe at that time they guessed-and they probably absolutely guessed-that it would cost $10 billion. They figured we might have another Pan Am 103, but it still wasn't worth the cost of the heightened levels of security. In fact, they made a flippant comment. The security chief at that meeting said, "Look, if we made airports completely safe they'd just go bomb other targets like Amtrak." I was so stunned by that.
You caused controversy when you complained about the FAA's treatment of ValuJet after that airline's 1996 crash in the Everglades. You accused officials of "going easy" on the airline even before the crash and you were subsequently vilified in the press. As saddened as we all are by the Sept. 11 tragedy, do you feel at all vindicated?
The name I got from the industry was "Scary Mary," and they said that I was causing unnecessary alarm. Vindication is not the right thing to feel. I mean, I knew I was right. I don't mean to sound egotistical, but I had an entire office of 500 employees doing that work with me. I didn't make it up. No one said we were wrong; they just said we were alarmists. I always thought they had it completely backward. They waited until tragedy and until people lost their lives and then they'd fix the holes. I thought you ought to fix the holes so people didn't have to lose their lives. So the emotion I have now is the same old me: urgency. We're now two weeks past the tragedy, and I frankly don't think they're doing enough, quickly enough. It's still the same old me, Scary Mary, saying, "Do more, do more."
In six months what's to keep airlines and the lobbyists from backing off of the kind of safety changes we're discussing now?
Everybody gets complacent. There is tremendous hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth, and we call lots of commissions after tragedies but we forget and, you know, the FAA forgets, too. The thing that would protect us the most would be removing the function of watching out for aviation economics from the FAA. Another thing we have to do immediately, and I have called for this for years, is to strip out security-which is a law-enforcement function-from the FAA, which is a civil-aviation agency. That has to be done. I'm really thrilled that we have this new office of Homeland [Defense], which would be a good place to put [aviation security enforcement], but it has not been placed there yet, which is a little disturbing. I was actually kind of hoping we would hear that [on Thursday] in the president's announcement, but we did not.
Do you have any kind of inside line on what kinds of changes we can expect? Sky marshals? Locked cockpits? Armed pilots?
The president was fairly honest about it. He said we only had a few dozen sky marshals. I think we had about 30 when I left the department. I fought to save that program, too, and the answer from the FAA was the same, "We don't need them. We don't have hijackings and domestic terrorism." But if we are going to renew the air marshals program, arming pilots is a very, very poor idea. I don't think the pilots in the pilot's union thought that through too carefully. The pilots would have to be trained at a law-enforcement training academy; they'd have to receive legal training on when it is permissible to use deadly force; they'd have to have specialized training on shoot/no-shoot decision making and, finally, they'd have to be deputized federal law-enforcement agents. By the time you've done all that you've made a huge investment. Sky marshals are an answer to pilots asking for guns.
What do you think about the fact that the system in place on Sept. 11 posed no challenge to the terrorists? That, in fact, the terrorists may not even have broken any rules since our airport security is designed to detect guns and explosives more than it is meant to spot dangerous people?
I don't think that they just blithely walked through security. I think that they had assistance. But the people who are going to protect us now are the same government agencies that said we were safe from domestic attacks. The point is that [the FAA] knew it was a sieve. On many occasions they made comments like, "Well, as long as people think it's safe ... it's the perception that deters a lot of the crime." Now we're hearing the same thing, which is why I don't like people starting to talk about how we have to get the public confidence up. No, we have to truly improve security because the confidence game, the gig's up. How do we fight terrorists when they have scoped out our system so well that they know where our weaknesses are and they know where our policies have failed? You do that with one national policy run the same in every airport. I've had scissors taken away from me, yet these men can get on with box cutters? I've been profiled at Dulles, Chicago, BWI, and I've had probably half a dozen, 10 federal background checks. It is a system that works sporadically all over the country, has a different airport security plan for every one of the 420 airports, that is run differently not only at every airport but at every concourse.
How do you feel about the profiling that is taking place on airplanes now? Can you think of alternatives to such racism in the skies?
The problem with profiling is that profiling as we do it now at the airports is not scientific, law-enforcement profiling. It's kind of a hit-or-miss process, and while it's not supposed to be based on race, sex, or religion, we have a cadre of low-paid and high-turnover employees engaging in what is, even for trained law enforcement like the FBI, one of the most difficult tasks. We don't have a good system to check all baggage and all passengers. If we had 100 percent bag check we wouldn't need profiling, and if we had a way of checking the people getting on the plane against a national database of criminals and those who have overstayed visas, we wouldn't need profiling. Sept. 11 showed that the profiling engaged in by airlines doesn't work. Sadly, Americans who don't fit the stereotype of what Americans are supposed to look like are being picked on, and they have a reason to complain. The profiling that airlines do is a stopgap measure designed to make us feel better. They admitted in the wake of Pan Am 103 that we didn't know what was in the baggage, so instead we were worrying about who was checking it. But the people at the check-in counter can't do profiling that even the most highly trained FBI agents find to be difficult.
How easy is it for airport support staff like shop workers, caterers and custodians to access areas that should be totally secure? Has it gotten harder for support staff to get into secure areas since Sept. 11?
It's hard to tell. I do think insiders were involved. All you have to do is file your job application so there's no gaps in your employment history, and no checks are triggered. There are cases of aviation employers, where if you filed your application with a gap they'd return it to you and tell you to fill it in. They were desperate for workers who would take that pay. The system was stacked against catching any problems.
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