Airport Security Technology Stuck In the Pipeline

Meanwhile, the government spent only a fraction of that amount -- about $600 million from 2001 to 2007 -- on technology to be used at checkpoints, including upgrades of X-ray machines and devices that can analyze a swab taken of passengers' clothing for traces of explosives.

Even when companies did approach the TSA with new ideas, government officials said they were less than impressed with the results.

"Company after company, trying to be helpful and make some money, was pushing their technology. . . . After testing it, we found it didn't do near what they promised," recalled John Magaw, the TSA's first administrator.

By 2004, TSA officials believed they were being confronted by another serious security threat: Terrorists suspected of hiding plastic explosives under their clothes slipped through security and blew up two Russian jetliners. Magnetometers -- the ubiquitous metal detectors that have long been a staple of airport security -- would never have spotted such explosives strapped to terrorists' bodies, so the TSA increased the number of pat-downs of passengers, a move that angered some travelers.

TSA officials also rushed to purchase scores of explosive trace portal machines, known as "puffers" because they blast air on passengers and then analyze particles that float off their clothes or skin for hints of a bomb. The agency bought 200 of the machines from General Electric and Smiths Detection, a unit of Smiths Group of Britain, and planned to install them at scores of airports.

By mid-2006, however, TSA officials had found that that the machines could not be deployed in main security lines because they took too long to screen passengers, and they often broke or were unreliable because they could not withstand the dust, grime and jet-fuel fumes in airports. Annual maintenance costs soared to as much as $48,000 for each device. The TSA has plopped 109 of the devices in a Texas warehouse, where they are to remain until officials and vendors come up with ways to make them operate more efficiently.

The puffer problems, in part, led the Government Accountability Office to conclude in a report last year that the TSA has not been particularly effective in getting new technology to checkpoints. The report, issued last February, "found that limited progress has been made in developing and deploying technologies due to planning and funding challenges."

The GAO partly blamed the delay on the government's troubles in "coordinating research and development efforts." It also noted that "TSA does not yet have a strategic plan in place to assist in guiding its efforts to acquire and deploy screening technologies." The GAO reiterated much of that criticism in follow-up documents.

TSA Administrator Kip Hawley countered that the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have come up with a strategic plan and work well with their counterparts to develop new technology.

Hawley said the lack of new technology at checkpoints has more to do with private industry than anything else. Companies do not invest a lot of cash in devices that only have a limited pool of demand: several hundred U.S. airports.

"The real story here is that the capital markets do not value the security industry as a place to put their capital," Hawley said.

Hawley, who took the top TSA job in mid-2005, is the longest serving of four administrators since the agency was formed by Congress in late 2001. The agency has gone through three chief technology officers. Some vendors said that high turnover rate has not helped matters.