August 25, 2008
Was Elio Montenegro Right or Wrong?
I've been watching with interest the debate going on over at aero-news about the TSA flight inspector that grounded some planes over at O'Hare. It's kind of a long story, so here's a brief recap:
A TSA inspector (tasked with inspecting planes) was looking over some planes over at O'Hare. Seeing a metal post jutting out of the front of the plane, he tried to climb it (looking to see if surreptitious entrance could be gained to the cockpit that way.) Unbeknownst to him, the post he was climbing was the temperature gauge (which is pretty important, apparently). The gauge broke, they maintenance crew found it, and they grounded the plane. Not a good situation in any light, but here's where it gets freaky.
Now comes some serious aftermath. Airline personnel flipped out. They called the inspector "bumbling", "incompetent", and compared him to Inspector Clouseau. The aero-news article is the most vitriolic (which is, of course, why I selected it), but suffice it to say that there was major backlash.
The TSA responded saying that they encourage inspectors to find issues like this one. This just put more fuel on the fire. Aero-news ran an update to their original story, where they recommended that the TSA be dismantled because they have "the potential to imperil the flying public in myriad ways". Again - major freaking out.
But, as a security professional reading this, *both* the TSA inspector and the airline response creep me out. OK, so the inspector endangering lives - that's never good. But the fact that one guy can do something seemingly minor, out of sight of any ground personnel, that could potentially bring down the plane isn't comforting. Isn't the TSA ostensibly there to stop just this kind of thing?
Think about that for a minute, and put aside the fact that the temperature probe practically begs someone to slap a climbing karabiner on it. If the TSA's job is to look for attacks - and the reaction from the airline pros makes me think this is a pretty good one - isn't this inspector a hero? After all, from a security practitioner point of view, the fact that the TSA inspector was thinking outside the box and looking for a useful point of attack to the plane means he's doing his job.
It comes down, in my opinion, to the fact that there's a disconnect between the TSA and the folks in the airline industry about what the role of the TSA inspector to be. If their role is to find "security issues", they should be encouraged to find problems like this and point them out (so they can get fixed). If their job is something else - well, then they shouldn't be monkeying around with the probes. At the end of the day, if it's true that damaging the temperature sensor prior to takeoff is "an extraordinarily dangerous incident", it seems to me that somebody ought to know about that before somebody else deliberately sabotages one.
Now, some pilots think the role of the TSA should be more limited. According to the article, some pilots "respond that agents are only allowed to check for unlocked cabin doors" in their inspection. That seems bogus to me. Seriously - checking the door? If that's the role of the TSA, I'd ask what's the point of having TSA inspectors at all? Get the pilots to check if it's locked. Seriously - you reach over, jiggle the handle or whatever, and whamo-blamo, Bob's your uncle (for realz on this one, I do it with my car door all the time.)
Anyway, at the end of the day, I think the fact that this probe can be damaged by a lone person - and that the damage to that probe can jeopardize the lives of the passengers - is a significant threat. Is it the TSA inspector's job to find this threat? Maybe not. Maybe he was totally in the wrong. But shouldn't it be somebody's job to point it out? And how about fixing the issue? Maybe it makes sense to hire TSA inspectors who are also aircraft mechanics so that they know how to look for issues like this; maybe it makes sense to guard the plane when it's on the ground. But seriously - somebody do something.
It seems to me that the TSA and the airline personnel should be working together on this rather than going after each other. In the gap between the pilots' outrage and the TSA's "blue line", there's issues that clearly aren't getting fixed.
Posted by Ed at August 25, 2008 10:26 AM | TrackBack