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As pilots struggled to
control the jet, Bradley pushed the captain and fought the
first officer. Passengers tackled him to keep him at bay.
In the months that followed, crewmembers
aboard Flight 259 pushed for more protection aboard commercial
jets. In a letter this spring to the Federal Aviation
Administration and 18 members of Congress, flight attendant
Ginny Cavins pleaded for a ban on knives and steps to fortify
cockpit doors "to help prevent future incidents."
The letter ended with
a chilling plea. "We need your help," she wrote. "Changes must
be made. It could be you or your loved one onboard a flight
next time an air rage or even a hijacking incident
occurs."
The failure of federal regulators to heed
her warning, or to remedy security breaches aboard hundreds of
flights each year, illustrates a decade-long disregard by U.S.
authorities for incidents of in-flight violence, a USA TODAY
investigation shows.
During those 10 years, passengers
repeatedly assaulted flight attendants. In more than a dozen
instances, unruly passengers gained access to the cockpit — or
tried to, unsuccessfully. On other occasions, passengers used
knives as weapons. Airlines considered costly changes to the
doors, and the FAA urged a "zero tolerance" approach to
handling unruly passengers. But for all the talk, the agency
seldom punished passengers and never ordered airlines to
address many of the weaknesses terrorists exploited Sept. 11,
when they hijacked four jets and crashed three into
buildings.
"These were lessons not learned," says
Howard Luker, a former FBI agent who worked with a
presidential commission to examine aviation safety and
security. "The FAA needed to take more aggressive approaches
to prevent what would happen. The results have been
catastrophic."
Safety advocates say the FAA failed to
act because the agency did not take cases of unruly passengers
seriously. No government watchdog group monitored how such
cases were handled, and the agency seldom viewed incidents as
opportunities to learn about the vulnerabilities of jets in
flight. Its attitude toward the issue is underscored by how
the agency responded to reported offenses.
USA TODAY reviewed hundreds of pages of
documents and internal FAA memos, many obtained through the
Freedom of Information Act. The newspaper also collected crime
statistics from airport police, analyzed actions taken in
unruly-passenger cases and interviewed dozens of current and
former FAA officials, safety advocates, counterterrorism
experts and others.
The findings:
- In hundreds of on-board incidents that drew airport
police, the FAA never opened an investigation or even sent
inspectors to interview witnesses or victims.
- When the agency chose to investigate, in most cases
officials either took no action or mailed unruly passengers
warning letters.
- Despite an FAA pledge to crack down on unruly passengers
5 years ago, the agency actually was more lenient with
offenders in subsequent years.
Whether a more aggressive approach would
have thwarted the Sept. 11 hijackings is impossible to gauge.
Before the attacks, for instance, standard airline flight
procedures called for pilots to cooperate with hijackers.
Fortifying cockpit doors might have made little difference if
pilots willingly opened them.
But stronger security measures and a more
aggressive approach by the FAA might have created a climate
that dissuaded terrorists from even trying to hijack the
flights, some counterterrorism experts say. At a minimum, most
agree, toughening onboard security might have made the
terrorists less deadly or effective.
Others in Congress and the FAA share that
view. In the weeks after the hijackings, lawmakers and agency
officials fixed almost every problem flight attendants and
safety advocates had pointed out for years. They banned
knives, strengthened cockpit doors and took other steps to
improve onboard security, ostensibly to prevent or deter
future attacks.
"If the FAA had taken the initiative
years ago ... we certainly would have had a much harder target
for the terrorists to have to penetrate," says Reynold Hoover,
a former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent and
counterterrorism expert.
'Just plain indifference'
Why the FAA, the agency responsible for
ensuring safety and security aboard U.S. commercial jets,
failed to correct weaknesses exposed during incidents
involving unruly passengers remains unclear. FAA Administrator
Jane Garvey "politely declined" the newspaper's requests for
interviews, an agency spokeswoman said.
Two top officials who agreed to
interviews say violent incidents that put flights in peril did
not happen frequently enough to justify ordering major
modifications to thousands of commercial jets. Five other
officials refused the newspaper's interview requests.
Other current and former FAA officials,
some of whom requested anonymity for fear of job reprisals,
say many in the agency viewed cases involving unruly
passengers as annoyances, not as chances to address security
vulnerabilities.
"I couldn't find anyone who cared," says
Steve Elson, a former FAA special agent who tested and
monitored security at some of the nation's largest airports.
"It was just plain indifference, all the way across the chain
of command."
In the case of Flight 259, federal
prosecutors concluded that Bradley was "suffering from a
severe mental debilitation that day ... that made it
impossible for him to form the intent" to do harm. Instead of
pushing for a jail sentence, they agreed to allow Bradley to
seek medical help. He now reports to a neurologist every 6
months.
Flight attendant Cavins, other members of
the crew and the airline were less concerned about Bradley's
intent than about the results: a broken cockpit door, a
passenger carrying a knife, a flight crew easily overcome.
They made certain the FAA knew about their security concerns —
and the potential for catastrophe. In her letter to the
agency, Cavins even made the connection no one in the FAA had:
A hijacker could take advantage of all the weaknesses unruly
passengers had exploited.
But as the FAA's then-security director
Michael Canavan wrote last July in a response to Cavins'
letter, the agency left to the airlines the decision on
banning knives. Strengthening the cockpit door, he wrote, was
under discussion by an advisory committee.
The flight attendants aren't surprised
little was done. "What happened to us should've been big
enough for the government to step in and do something about
it," flight attendant Cindy Russell says. "But to the FAA, it
was just an episode that got put in a file somewhere."
Low priority cases
When Bradley broke into the cockpit in
March 2000, he joined at least a dozen others in the past 3
years who tried or succeeded in breaking through the flimsy
door. Not even the FAA knows precisely how many made it
through. A spokeswoman says the agency doesn't keep track.
But the succession of incidents involving
knives or cockpit breaches drew widespread publicity and calls
for action. Last December, a 46-year-old Texas man forced an
American Airlines jet to land after threatening crewmembers
with a 2-inch knife. Four months earlier, in August 2000, a
19-year-old man kicked a panel loose from the cockpit door
aboard a Southwest Airlines flight; the man was killed by
fellow passengers who tried to subdue him. In March 2000, the
same month of the Bradley incident, an America West jet was
diverted after a female passenger pounded on the cockpit door
and shoved and slapped the co-pilot.
Overseas, similar incidents occurred. In
June 1999, a man forced his way into the cockpit of an All
Nippon Airways airliner in Japan and fatally stabbed the
pilot. In March 2000, a passenger burst into the cockpit of a
charter flight over Spain, grabbed the controls and yelled
"I'm bringing you all down!"
After Sept. 11 but before airlines
fortified doors, a mentally unstable man broke into the
cockpit on an American Airlines flight Oct. 8 from Los Angeles
to Chicago.
"How many does it take?" asks Philip
King, an aviation security consultant, former FBI agent and
counterterrorism expert. "If they're kicking doors in and
getting into the cockpit, why didn't we make the cockpit door
stronger? ...The public ought to know that the opportunity was
there. The public agencies just didn't respond."
Typically, flight crews radio for airport
police to meet flights on which an unruly-passenger incident
takes place. If the incident is violent, police usually notify
the FBI, which might send an agent to the gate. FAA inspectors
seldom respond to the calls. Instead, they ask airport police
to send them case reports, or they try to coordinate with the
FBI in many of the most serious cases.
FAA officials say they focused on trying
to deter passengers from becoming unruly by persuading federal
authorities to prosecute offenders criminally. In most of the
worst cases — including cockpit breaches or violence involving
weapons — offenders have been charged with violating federal
law.
But many U.S. attorneys declined to
prosecute lesser offenses, including assaults. In part, that's
because they didn't consider the cases high priorities.
That left most cases to the FAA, which
has the power to assess fines as high as $25,000 against
offenders. Agency workers are in a position to meet each
flight and take statements from witnesses and crewmembers, and
they can examine each case with an eye toward preventing
future incidents.
Safety advocates say the FAA did neither
because it viewed the cases as low priorities. A USA TODAY
analysis of 1,519 unruly-passenger cases, opened and closed
from 1990 through 2000, shows the agency's approach:
- The FAA collected fines from unruly passengers in 508
cases, or a third of the time.
- In another third of the cases, the federal agency either
sent a warning letter, was unable to locate the offender, or
determined that a fine was "uncollectable."
- The agency did nothing in 449 cases, or 30%.
"It's beyond amazing. It's criminal,"
says Pat Friend, president of the Association of Flight
Attendants. The union, which represents 50,000 crewmembers,
has criticized the FAA repeatedly for failing to take
in-flight violence issues seriously. "The truth is, they
didn't act," Friend says. "And they acted as though they
didn't care."
'Zero tolerance' in action
Even as the number of incidents jumped,
the FAA's enforcement action varied little. In 1996, the
agency issued its only official statement to airlines
regarding unruly passengers. The advisory did not require
action but provided guidance about how airlines should act. It
stressed the need for "zero tolerance" when unruly passengers
interfered with flight crews.
A month after issuing the circular, Linda
Hall Daschle, then FAA's acting administrator, reiterated the
agency's stance. "We will not tolerate any interference with
the vital safety functions performed by crewmembers," she
said.
Instead of cracking down, however, the
agency went easier on unruly passengers during the 4 full
years after the "zero tolerance" advisory was issued.
Regulators took action more often than in 1996, but that
action usually consisted of issuing a warning letter — a
notice that carries no legal or financial penalty.
In fact, the percentage of offenders who
paid fines decreased from the 1996 level.
An FAA deputy associate administrator,
Margaret Gilligan, says she cannot recall the agency's issuing
special instructions to its inspectors to crack down on
offenders. She says "zero tolerance" meant simply that the
agency would handle each case based on the evidence. "I don't
know what the percentage (of passengers fined) has to do with
it," she says.
Understanding why the FAA chose to punish
some offenders but not others is difficult, even for the FAA.
The agency's record-keeping procedures call for case files to
be destroyed within months in cases in which offenders are not
fined. Consequently, trying to determine whether alleged
offenders should have been punished is impossible.
Internal FAA reports obtained by USA
TODAY, however, raise questions about how seriously agency
officials viewed violent outbursts, including those in which
pilots were disturbed or drawn from the cockpit.
Among the cases federal prosecutors did
not pursue:
- On May 27, 1997, an American Airlines passenger "beat on
the cockpit door and harassed flight attendants and
passengers. He then sexually harassed a female flight
attendant by grabbing her buttocks," one report says. His
punishment: a warning letter.
- On Nov. 27, 1997, during a Delta Air Lines flight from
New York to Los Angeles, a male passenger "grabbed a female
flight attendant's hand three times and made sexual advances
towards her. The passenger... would not let the female
flight attendant continue with her duties." As a result, the
report says, the flight engineer "left the cockpit twice in
an effort to get the passenger to stop his behavior." The
passenger's punishment: a warning letter.
- On Dec. 17, 1997, on United Airlines Flight 876 from
Japan to Los Angeles, a U.S. Navy serviceman "choked a
flight attendant" and "was restrained by three other
servicemen," the report says. His punishment: a warning
letter.
$100 fines
Cases in which fines were assessed raise
similar questions about the agency's willingness to crack down
on offenders.
In one case in March 1997, a man aboard
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Flight 601 began bothering passengers
about 2 hours into an overseas flight and had to be warned by
the captain. The passenger was asked to stay seated. Six hours
later, the report says, the passenger "became violent and was
wrestled to the floor by members of the flight crew and
passengers and subsequently handcuffed to a seat in the rear
of the aircraft. One flight attendant was elbowed in the
stomach during this altercation." More than a year later, the
man paid a fine to the FAA. His payment: $100.
"At no time did I ever see the FAA ever
really come down hard on these unruly passengers," says John
Otto, former acting director of the FBI, who retired as Delta
Air Line's security director in 1999.
In the cases cited by USA TODAY, the
FAA's deputy chief counsel, James Whitlow, says he "can't
possibly" address whether the punishment was appropriate
without examining the case files — all of which have been
destroyed, in keeping with agency policy.
He says many cases might have been closed
quickly with no action taken because inspectors lacked enough
evidence that passengers did anything wrong. That would make
fining passengers difficult, he says, and might explain why
passengers weren't fined more often.
But like FAA official Gilligan, the
agency's legal department appears to put little importance on
punishment rates. Whitlow says he does not know what
percentage of cases ended with fines paid. Asked whether he
has a general idea, he says, "not really." The prosecution
rate, he argues, illustrates little.
"That doesn't mean we didn't care enough
to do any more," he says. "You know why I'm comfortable with
it? Because I know the people who made the decisions."
Crucial connections
No matter how such cases were handled,
current and former FAA officials say no one within the agency
made crucial connections that might have prompted action to
fortify jets before Sept. 11.
Some of the incidents showed that irate
passengers were able to overpower flight attendants. They also
showed that a single passenger — sometimes drunk, sometimes
ill — could succeed at breaking through the cockpit door. If
an irate passenger could gain access to the cockpit, what
about a hijacker?
"Everybody assumed that hijacking was
over. We hadn't had one here in a decade," says a current FAA
official with knowledge of security planning. "Even when we
had discussions about hijacking, someone would say, 'Why are
we talking about this at all? Hijackings never happen.' "
The airlines didn't seem particularly
troubled either. All could have banned knives. All could have
offered self-defense training to flight attendants. But as
Friend, president of the flight attendants union, recalls,
only a handful took even small steps, such as equipping jets
with "flex cuffs" — plastic handcuffs used to restrain unruly
passengers.
For Alaska Airlines, the Bradley incident
served as "a wake-up call for us, a reality check," spokesman
Jack Evans says. He says officials met with the FAA and asked
to put a bar over the cockpit door. Other airlines considered
similar steps. "We were basically told the (regulations) don't
allow it, " Alaska's Evans says.
As a consequence, no U.S. carrier had
begun to retrofit planes before Sept. 11. "We've continued to
look to the FAA to tell us what we needed to do with our
cockpit doors," explains Michael Wascom, a spokesman for the
Air Transport Association, a trade group representing the
nation's largest airlines.
As for banning knives, Wascom says
airlines "were in compliance with FAA regulations. The FAA
sets all of this. The airlines don't."
Representatives of the nation's largest
pilots union, the Air Line Pilots Association, say their
members have sought hardened doors for more than a
quarter-century. But before Sept. 11, they concede, they were
more concerned about how pilots would escape from a fortified
cockpit than they were about keeping passengers out.
So was the FAA, Gilligan says. Before
Sept. 11, the agency had concluded that fortifying cockpit
doors would have made jets less safe, she says. If the jet
rapidly decompressed, a fortified door might not blow out to
allow pilots to escape the cockpit. If pilots became
incapacitated, a hardened door might prevent crewmembers from
getting in to try to fly the jet.
One pilots union member who was part of
an FAA advisory committee discussing the door issue even
lauded the agency's approach. "I felt the FAA acted as quickly
as necessary," says Peter Reiss, a pilot.
That's not how others saw it. When the
vulnerability of the doors became clear in the 1990s, some
safety advocates suggest the agency should have ordered
airlines to temporarily barricade the cockpits until it
decided how to retrofit planes. That's what happened in the
weeks after Sept. 11.
And though discussions about hardening
the cockpit door were underway, banning knives and training
flight attendants to defend themselves weren't on the FAA's
agenda, flight attendant union president Friend says. The
union tried to push the FAA by petitioning last year for rules
to force airlines to train crewmembers. A union spokeswoman
says the organization has yet to hear back.
"You can blame the airlines," Friend
says, "but it was the FAA that let them get away with it.
They're the ones who have the responsibility. But instead,
they allowed the industry to tell them what they wanted to
do."
One of the reasons the agency might not
have acted: None of the watchdog groups that typically monitor
aviation safety and security — the National Transportation
Safety Board, the General Accounting Office and the Department
of Transportation's inspector general — considered unruly
passengers within their purview. Consequently, none pressured
the FAA to toughen security.
"I felt all along that the NTSB ought to
have jurisdiction overlooking security as well as safety,"
says Jim Hall, the former NTSB chairman. "But historically, we
have never done it, and our statute is not clear that we have
that responsibility. To try to take on that added
responsibility without a clear direction from Congress would
have been ridiculous."
'Nobody would listen'
Even the FAA's harshest critics concede
that no one could have foreseen the events of Sept. 11.
Nevertheless, absent the attacks, one top FAA security
official says the unruly-passenger issue was a catastrophe
waiting to happen.
"These were things that could've brought
planes down for the last decade," says the official, among
those who was told not to comment by superiors.
Safety advocates agree. They have been
troubled by the FAA's approach to the issue since the
mid-1990s. "We've been saying that no one would do anything
until a plane crashed," says Mike Sheffer, who launched The
SkyRage Foundation after his wife, flight attendant Renee
Sheffer, was hurt in 1997 by an unruly passenger.
"Now, it's closing the barn door after
the cows have left," he says. "I just wish someone had
listened when we still had a chance."
That's how flight attendants aboard
Alaska Airlines Flight 259 feel. "We needed somebody to listen
to us, and you don't want it to take 5 years," Cavins
says.
In the days after Sept. 11, Russell
couldn't help making the comparison between the man who
stormed the cockpit of the Alaska flight and the
hijackers.
"It was like a part of me felt guilty —
like I should've stood up and talked louder," she says. "The
only difference between the hijackings and what happened to us
was that it was just one crazy man aboard our flight, not four
people.
"To me, what happened to us should have
been a red flag. But nobody would listen."
Barbara Hansen, Paul Overberg and
William Risser contributed to this story | 