Baggage Match Plan Scrapped

<I>Washington, D.C.</I> - The White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security issued its final recommendations to tighten domestic aviation safety and security this month, but did not adopt a strict passenger bag match program that has been hotly debated for the past five months.

The 21-member commission, chaired by Vice President Al Gore, in its initial report last September called for all domestic flights to add to the positive bag match requirement placed on international flights. But the airlines balked at the concept, saying it would cause tremendous flight delays as they attempted to ensure that every bag loaded onto a domestic flight had an accompanying passenger.

The concept also brought into question the future of advance boarding passes, electronic ticketing and curbside checkin, which allow passengers to bypass the checkin counter. Following a heavy lobbying effort by the airlines, the commission instead ruled that airlines should ensure that all passengers are positively identified and subjected to security procedures before boarding an aircraft, and that an electronic profiling system be developed to select certain passengers for additional luggage inspection.

The FAA is already at work with Northwest Airlines on such an automated profiling system, and the commission urged that the system be implemented no later than Dec. 31 of this year. The Northwest-FAA test date for their Computer Assisted Passenger Screening system on Northwest flights is April 1997.

Factors that could be part of such a "red flag" early warning system are expected to include whether the passenger's tickets were purchased with cash, how close to flight time the tickets were bought and the traveler's destination. The commission specifically ruled out using race, religion or nation of origin in the profiling system, but that still didn't please civil rights and Arab-American groups, which immediately wrote to Gore saying a profiling system will tend to single out passengers with Arabic-sounding names for "humiliating" travel delays.

The commission stressed, however, that profiling and baggage matching will only be needed until advanced technology for detecting explosives proves effective and the cost of that equipment makes it affordable at all 450 of the nation's major airports.

The commission also determined that the federal government should play a greater role in providing airline security, recognizing that terrorist threats against aviation are, in effect, threats against the U.S. government.