Fmr. CEO of American Airlines Calls Full-Body Scanners in Airports a ‘Waste of Resources’

Fox News
Friday, January 8th, 2010

This is a rush transcript from “Your World With
Neil Cavuto,” January 6, 2010. This copy may not be in its final
form and may be updated.

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: Authorities in Dublin are trying to get to the
bottom of an incident in which live explosives made it on to a
passenger plane. Have you heard about this? Only, this really
wasn’t about terrorism. Get this. This was actually a security
test.

Apparently, a passenger unwittingly carried real bomb parts in his
luggage from a flight from Slovakia — the pilot deciding to fly
even after being told an explosive was in the checked luggage.
Generally, that is not good. The incident comes as the president
prepares to release a review of airline security tomorrow. But will
that review go far enough?

Exclusive reaction now from airline industry legend Bob Crandall, the former CEO of AMR, the parent of American Airlines.

Robert, good to have you. Happy new year.

ROBERT CRANDALL, FORMER CEO, AMR CORPORATION: Hi, Neil. How are you?

CAVUTO: Very good.

What do you make, first off, of this airport incident in Ireland? I
mean, we have seen a lot of this kind of stuff going on lately. Do you
feel safe flying?

CRANDALL: Oh, I feel safe enough, Neil.

But I just think we’re doing lots of things wrong. Maybe the
first thing we’re doing wrong is, we’re paying way too much
attention to the things that go on an airplane, and we’re not
paying not nearly enough attention to the people.

We’re not executing well. We’re not differentiating
between low-risk and high-risk, and we’re not using technology
very effectively. And for all those reasons, the system isn’t
nearly as good as it should be and could be.

CAVUTO: Still, I guess the latest salvation for us are these so-
called body scanners that show you in your complete birthday suit and
all of that. And that seems to be the solution for a lot of folks.

CRANDALL: No. Well, I think…

CAVUTO: What do you think of that?

CRANDALL: I think, look, the body scanners, in the first place, you
can’t use today’s body scanners, because they take 40 to 50
seconds per person. There aren’t enough body scanners. And if you
tried to body scan everybody, you would simply diminish the ability of
the airline system to operate.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with body scanners.

CAVUTO: We should say that the scanner’s maker says that that
figure’s overstated. It would add at best a half-a-minute. But
you’re quite right.

CRANDALL: Well…

CAVUTO: If you add all of that together times the number of people waiting, it’s substantial.

But continue.

CRANDALL: Well, but the real — I think the real issue, Neil,
is this. Most of the people that go through security don’t need a
full body scan.

Certainly, if we had a trusted traveler program, where people had
been with a — had been — gotten a thorough examination, a
background check before they got to the airport, we don’t need to
put those people through a body scanner.

What we need to do is, we need to differentiate between those people
who are a risk and those people who are unlikely to be a risk.
Let’s put the high-risk people through the body scanners. That
— now we will have enough body scanners, and, in fact, we will
have enough much more expensive body scanners.

You know, a body scanner is about $150,000. An X-ray machine is
about $10,000. You’re not going to use — you cannot useful
full body scanning on everything. And doing so is silly. It’s
just a waste of resources and a waste of money.

If you look what the Israelis do, the Israelis use layered security,
four or five layers of security, all of it focused on the people, not
on the things. And they use technology. For example, if they see a bag
that might have a bomb in it, they put it in a bomb box.

If in fact they spot a bag at the ticket counter that might have a
bomb in it, they’re encapsulated within an area. They don’t
have to evacuate the whole terminal, the way we did at Newark the other
day.

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