As Logan grows, a race to train screeners begins
CHELSEA -- Logan International Airport opens a rebuilt Terminal A in two weeks, offering millions of passengers a glittering gateway to the world from the former home of Eastern Airlines. It will also create fresh personnel demands on the Transportation Security Administration, which is losing about 25 percent of its employees each year while laboring to keep its airport checkpoints staffed across the country.
Nonetheless, George N. Naccara, head of TSA operations in Boston and the Northeast, remains optimistic, in part because his office operates a trailblazing screener training office as well as the agency's first recruiting center. He is seeking 125 new workers for Terminal A, the new home of
''It's a challenging job because we're asking these people to do two things at the same time: provide a high level of security and a high level of customer service," Naccara said last week during a tour of the center. While he spoke, a new class of recruits was finishing its first week of training. After several days listening to lecturers and working off a computer-study program, they were trying to master one of a screener's most fundamental tasks: properly hand-wanding a passenger.
Two middle-aged women, part of a corps that tends toward career changers or people seeking their first job, took turns screening each other, all the while being watched by a veteran TSA employee brought from Logan to help train them. As the trainees slowly moved the hand-held magnetometer around each other's body contours, they recited a script aimed at explaining the process to passengers and allaying any apprehensions. Such hand inspections are used if a passenger sets off an alarm at a metal detector, or if they have been preselected for extra screening.
The challenge facing the TSA, which was created by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to replace poorly trained private security screeners, is to find and train workers quickly enough to replace departing screeners.
Many leave either because they feel underpaid (screener salaries range from $23,500 to $37,000 annually, with supervisors earning more) or, as is increasingly the case, private security firms poach them. The firms feel the government credentials give their workforce added cachet as they market their services to increasingly security-conscious corporations.
At the same time, Congress capped the number of screeners at 45,000 nationwide, even as US airline traffic has bounced back after 9/11. The count fell to 446 million passengers in 2001, a drop of 6 percent from the prior year, but steadily increased to 474 million last year, equal to what it was in 2000. Airline traffic is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.
At Logan Airport, the TSA's systemwide challenge becomes clear with the opening of the $475 million Terminal A, the first major airport terminal in the country to be designed and built for the post-9/11 era. While that means it will have wider checkpoint waiting areas than originally envisioned, as well as a baggage-screening area with networked computers that can be operated by fewer TSA employees, it also means more turf to cover for an agency stretched thin.
Currently there are 800 screeners who work in shifts seven days a week at Logan's four main terminals. They have to check about 12 million passengers per year, as well as roughly 15 million pieces of luggage. Neither is an idle task, because they still find about 11,000 banned items each year, including loaded handguns, canes with concealed knives, and more innocent items such as aftershave and cologne bottles shaped like dynamite sticks. One pastor tried to pass a checkpoint with a hollowed-out Bible that made an exploding sound and blew smoke when he opened it at moments in his sermon he believed demanded added drama.
''It's amazing some of the stuff that's produced around the world," said Naccara, shaking his head. Sitting in his office recently, he displayed a confiscated .357-caliber Magnum that in reality was a cigarette lighter that emitted a flame from its barrel when the trigger was pulled.
TSA officials in Washington approved Naccara's request for 125 additional screeners at Logan, and now the former Coast Guard admiral is racing to fill the posts. The airport's attrition rate bounces between 25 percent and 28 percent annually, above the national average, which departing employees blame, in part, on the Boston area's high cost of living.
Logan, from which two flights were hijacked on Sept. 11, was one of the first airports in the country to have a screener training center. It also was the first to have a recruitment center. There are now 20 nationwide, and they help fill openings in as little as a month.
Applicants to the Logan recruitment center are placed at 31 airports in New England and upstate New York, including Manchester, N.H., Providence, and Burlington, Vt. In all, Naccara oversees 11,000 screeners at 90 commercial airports from the Canadian border to North Carolina and West Virginia. There are four similar TSA area directors based in Tampa, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and San Francisco.
Prospective screeners first fill out an online application. They are then brought to the recruiting office, which is across the hall from the training center, where they are interviewed, fingerprinted electronically, given a basic physical exam, and perform a strength test by lifting a weighted dummy bag.
Roughly 20 at a time, they then enter a two-week training course. They receive about 80 hours of instruction and then about 100 hours of on-the-job training, both above the TSA-mandated levels of 40 hours in class and 60 hours on the job.
Following their training, recruits are certified as screeners, as well as baggage inspectors. They are then free to make decisions without the approval of a supervisor, but they must take three hours of recurrent training each week, as well as pass an annual recertification.
''It's one thing to do it in a classroom and have it explained," said Matthew Hanson, one of the two training supervisors, as the recruits practiced their wanding. ''But it's another for someone to hand you a wand and say, 'Now you do it.' "
Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com.
