Nearly everyone broadly agrees what air cargo should be doing against terrorism. But despite this, the industry is still waiting for the USA to show the way forward
Three years after 9/11, the air cargo industry is still waiting for a coherent plan for air cargo security to emerge from the US authorities. The US Customs and Protection Board did start in August to implement its long-promised and much-discussed advanced manifesting system (AMS), requiring airlines to send an electronic message to Customs 4h before flight arrival with details of all shipments on that flight. Yet it is still not clear how AMS will fit into a coherent anti-terrorism strategy for cargo, nor what the data will be used for. A plethora of other initiatives are in the pipeline, and foreign carriers and governments remain confused.
The implementation of AMS has at least been relatively smooth to date. The new rules applied to the eastern half of the USA from 13 August, with the midwest following in October and the West Coast in December. Since AMS required airlines to provide information that had previously only been known by forwarders - including details of the goods carried and names of shippers - there was much debate earlier in the year about whether it would violate the client confidentiality of forwarders.
Scare stories also suggested that many smaller forwarders would not be ready to meet the reporting requirements. But forwarder worries were obviously allayed and technology providers, including traditional cargo community system providers such as Traxon, rallied round with solutions, and as of late September carriers were reporting few problems. "Knock on wood, everything is fine so far," says Dave Brooks, president of cargo at American Airlines. "Most forwarders have been co-operative, and those who have work to do know who they are."
AMS is in its honeymoon period, and Customs has not yet started imposing penalties on those who have made errors in their reporting. One easy mistake to make, say carriers, is in piece counts. But how tough will Customs be in the event of discrepancies once grace periods are over remains to be seen. Will an aircraft in mid-flight be grounded?
On the broader front, uncertainty reigns about the ultimate form of US security policy. Last November the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published an outline approach to air-cargo security, confirming it was broadly looking at the kind of layered approach the air cargo industry thinks is the best solution. That means using checks on shippers and air transport procedures to identify the vast majority of shipments that are from bona fide sources, and confine physical screening to the small percentage that are not. On top of this, there would be a random screening programme covering about 10% of shipments, which is already mandatory for carriers serving the USA.
The TSA was supposed to put flesh on those bones by July this year by issuing a Notice of Permanent Rule Making. But that did not happen, and it could be the end of 2004 until it does. In the meantime, the air cargo industry worries that a security incident involving cargo could still spark a knee-jerk reaction that insists on the physical inspection of all air cargo, something all agree would be a disaster.
Such fears were not allayed when in August a Cuban woman managed to stow away on a freighter chartered by DHL from Nassau in the Bahamas to Miami, a repeat of an earlier incident in which a man shipped himself within the USA in an air cargo container. Nor is the air cargo industry reassured by the continued efforts of Edward Markey, a Democrat representative from Massachusetts, to get 100% screening of belly cargo implemented in Congress.
Such efforts have not succeeded, but, says Brooks, it could all too easily happen. "My experience is that if you sit down with legislators and show them pallets 6ft high, and the life-saving products we move, they realise that you cannot screen everything," he says. "But if there was an incident, it would be hard for them to explain to the ordinary voter what a layered approach means, especially in the absence of a clear programme from the TSA. Politicians say in that case they would have no alternative but to support a tougher measure."
The lack of clear direction from the TSA is at least partly the fault of politicians, however. Funding bills for the agency have become political footballs in Congress, and numerous congressional committees all try to have their influence. "There are over 80 congressional committees concerned with Homeland Security and the TSA is pulled in all directions," says David Jones, chairman of the National Cargo Security Council in the USA.
One example of the lack of funding is in the search for screening technologies appropriate to cargo. Efforts to apply the same approaches used for passenger baggage screening have not been successful. Lufthansa reveals that it has spent a considerable time in the past year with a super-sized X-ray machine that could take whole containers, but the machine had a huge failure rate and the images it produced were too complex for staff to interpret. Jack Boisen, vice-president cargo at Continental Airlines, says one device it tried took 7h to scan one container.
Both carriers agree that some kind of chemical sniffing or explosives detection technology would be better suited to cargo. The TSA has been given money by Congress to research such options. But only $55 million from a total budget of $2 billion is allocated to such research, a sum most regard as inadequate.
Meanwhile, there is also a raft of programmes, all of which could be part of a final security solution, but which now seem to operate in isolation or even overlap. The TSA's Known Shipper programme, and the common database on such shippers, is one example. The database has been in operation since June 2002, but its contents are merely inputted by forwarders without any further checks.
C-TPAT, the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, is a programme whereby shippers verify their suppliers, including air-cargo companies, checking if their procedures and premises are safe, and their employees screened. Proponents say it could easily become the basis for a comprehensive air-cargo security programme.
There is also TAPA, a programme against cargo crime started in the late 1990s by hi-tech companies such as Intel. Its proponents say it includes checks relevant to security against terrorism, such as securing premises and carrying out staff background checks.
On the sea freight side, the Container Security Initiative of US Customs, which involves checking sea freight shipments at key ports in the USA and overseas, and Operation Safe Commerce, which is looking at tamper-proof seals and how to track containers in transit, could also ultimately have relevance for air cargo.
European framework
Elsewhere in the world, the European Union agreed a common framework for aviation security on 19 January 2003 that was supposed to come into force in each member state at the start of 2004. Airlines say implementation is patchy and erratic, however. European carriers have set up BLACKS (an acronym of the initials of the main EU carriers) to agree "common principles" in security.
If all this sounds confusing, however, it need not be. The consensus remains that security has to start as far back up the supply chain as possible - ideally with the shipper. Once the credibility of a shipper or the contents of a shipment have been verified, its integrity throughout the transport process should be ensured by processes, employee checks, physical seals, tracking and advanced manifesting. A small percentage of shipments should then be randomly screened.
This is what airlines want and what most government agencies seem to agree is necessary: all that is lacking is the will or ability to make it come together. Meanwhile, cargo managers such as American's Brooks are having nightmares about what might be.
"The worry is that inspection will all end up at the end of the supply chain, the airport, which is the least effective and most expensive place to do it - and the furthest from the shippers who will therefore be less willing to pay for it," Brooks says.
PETER CONWAY IN LONDON
Source: Airline Business
