Hank Investigates: Airport Security Criticism

Dulles Airport is where hijackers boarded the flight they commandeered into the pentagon. FAA inspectors in the past ten years found more than 500 security violations. The most pervasive: failure to detect unauthorized items on x-ray machines.

At Newark airport, where hijackers boarded the Pennsylvania flight, FAA records show that since 1990, at least 39 weapons including loaded guns and hand grenades made it through security.

And these confidential reports from Newark airline employees reveal that in 1996, they found a person posing as a flight attendant, riding in the aircraft jump seat.

The point: as Massport officials have insisted, its not only Logan that has a security problem.

Tom Kinton, Massport Security Director
"There's no doubt in my mind that could have happened at any other airport in the country."

Joe Lawless, Logan's chief of security, is under fire for his lack of airport experience. But 7News has learned that in the world of airport security, Lawless is a respected member of the community.

Eric Grasser, World Aviation News
"These were the top people in the industry."

Eric Grasser was one of the few outsiders allowed into the high-level airport security summit in San Francisco last month. Information in the seminars so sensitive, only certain people were allowed.

Eric Grasser
"The major security players in the game of aviation security."

Hank Phillippi Ryan
"And Joe Lawless was one of them."

Eric Grasser
"Yes."

This agenda obtained by 7News shows the topics: "It Can't Happen Here--Anatomy of an Attempted Hijacking," "Advanced Technologies in Baggage Screening--and Airport Safety and Security," presented by Logan's Joe Lawless. In San Francisco, that seminar was a hit.

Eric Grasser
"Yes, yes, he very much seemed that he had his finders on the issues that are national problems at the airports."

Now, while local airports still battle to close security loopholes, some experts theorize if the hijackings could have been prevented, it might not have been in Logan's power to do so.

Eric Grasser
"They were foreign nationals not U.S. citizens making a one way flight with baggage that should have put off every red flag in the system to interrogate those people and they weren't interrogated."

Hank Phillippi Ryan
"Is that a local problem or a national problem?"

Eric Grasser
"That's a national problem."

State officials here in Massachusetts are now reviewing airport security, as are their counterparts in Virginia in New Jersey.

But unlike here in Massachusetts, people we talked to in those states indicated that there's no move to blame the hijackings on the people who run the airports.