The U.S. Department of Transportation announced yesterday it will launch a trial security program at Logan Airport and 14 other facilities across the country.
The Transportation Security Administration, the division of the Department of Transportation running the new program, said it is taking a serious look at ways airport security can be improved.
“Starting tomorrow morning, we’re going to have a scheduled team arriving at Logan to do process mapping of the entire flow of passengers through the airport,” said U.S. Deputy Transportation Secretary Michael Jackson.
Jackson and acting Gov. Jane Swift announced Logan was selected as one of 15 airports participating in a six-week federal endeavor to improve transportation security. Jackson said elements of this study will prove useful in establishing a new standard for better security practices in airports throughout the country.
Swift said she wrote to Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta last fall and volunteered Logan Airport as “a lab for experimentation” and “innovation” for any efforts to improve airport security.
Jackson said a team of security experts and private sector partners will work with a “very significant employment of federal resources” in the coming weeks to “figure out how we map vulnerabilities in airports.” Part of the goal of this project is to see “how we can employ technology to make it work,” he said.
The 14 other airport “labs” of various locations and sizes will help provide the same kind of information, Jackson said.
Swift went on to praise the steps the Massachusetts Port Authority has already taken to improve security at Logan, including trying out new security technologies and employing National Guardsmen at President Bush’s behest.
Swift said she hopes the joint state and federal efforts will make Logan the most secure airport in the country.
According to Jackson, passengers will not be affected by these measures.
“This will be transparent to passengers,” he said. “It won’t slow down the process.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
