Travel Security: Words From Our Founder

A Black Swan Story: The Inside Tale of How the TSA Got Built in Ten Weeks

A few words from John Vermilye, Founder of Travel Sentry

Love or hate the TSA, it's worth remembering how it was built and how fast.

Here's one inside story.

9/11 was a Black Swan. Nassim Taleb's term for an outlier beyond all expectation, with system-wide impact, that looks predictable only in hindsight. Could I have predicted it? No.

Less than ten weeks later, Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, creating the TSA with four main objectives on a brutal timeline:

Immediate:

• Expand the Federal Air Marshals program

Within one year:

• Federalize security screeners
• Upgrade passenger screening checkpoints

By 1 January 2003:

• 100% checked baggage screening

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, a Democrat in a Republican administration, and Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson did something unusual. Rather than rely on existing agencies, they assembled a "Rollout Team" of executives from Disney, FedEx, Intel, Marriott and others. Based on my airline operations and security experience, I was drafted in.

We were nomads. Squatters in a 1930s government building basement, the old Washington Star offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, and more. We worked like a start-up. Late nights, all-nighters, coffee and pizza.

Our first task was upgrading the checkpoints. Cloning the war room I built at IATA in Geneva for the industry's Y2K response, we could track progress at all 452 airports.

Next, a one-day training program for the 2,000 people arriving from Lockheed Martin, BearingPoint, Parsons and others. I called it Airport 101: how an airport is run, who you need to know, what your assignment is. It included a session on getting to know each other, blended teams from very different corporate cultures, heading to the airport that afternoon.

For me, none of this was new ground. Twenty years earlier at Eastern Air Lines, after a suitcase bomb killed a ramp worker in Guatemala, we started x-ray screening checked bags and built a system, so no bag flew without its passenger. After Air India 182 in 1985, IATA asked me to lead the overhaul of baggage security. This all proved handy.

Weeks before the January 2003 deadline for all checked baggage to be screened, I happened to ask what the procedure was for opening a locked bag when a screener saw something suspicious.

There wasn't one.

From that day on my assignment changed. We built the procedure from scratch the best that could be done in the time left. It is also when I drafted the Notification of Baggage Inspection, the notice most of us find in our luggage to this day. Getting millions printed over a Thanksgiving weekend and out to 452 airports was a feat.

All objectives were delivered on schedule, which was a rare example of strategic thinking and action from the top, not something we usually associate with Washington. What's more, these TSA processes are now global and we all are safer as a result.

The details are mostly forgotten now. But did you know the first TSA screener training program was based on the Ritz-Carlton's?