Screening not required for cargo-only planes
As authorities investigated the suspicious cargo aboard three UPS aircraft on Friday, federal officials said there was no policy or law ordering the screening of parcels loaded onto cargo-only planes.
As authorities investigated the suspicious cargo aboard three UPS aircraft on Friday, federal officials said there was no policy or law ordering the screening of parcels loaded onto cargo-only planes.
Just a few months ago, on August 3, a law went into effect requiring that all cargo loaded onto passenger jets be subjected to mandatory security screenings.
But cargo planes are immune to the law, said Stephen M. Lord, Director of the homeland security and justice team at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
"There is some screening conducted by customs and border patrol and TSA (Transporation Security Administration)," Lord said, "but it's more random, focused on high-risk flights."
The GAO issued a report this past summer as the new cargo mandate for passenger planes approached. Lord's office produced the study on the 100-percent screen requirement, as he called it. But the issue of screening of parcels on cargo planes has not been examined, he said, since 2007, when freighters were excluded from the screening law.
"I think it was perceived to be a higher risk, any plane carrying passengers," Lord said. "The attention's been focused on passenger flights because they were used in the 9-11 attacks."
And yet, a successful attack on a UPS cargo plane or facility could cause major problems - economically, at the very least - depending on the nature of it, said David G. Ross, a transportation analyst who follows UPS for investors, with Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., in Baltimore.
Ross said investors were not worried about the terror threat to transportation companies in light of what happened at Philadelphia and Newark airports and elsewhere.
"I'm not concerned," Ross said, who also monitors trucking and other transportation enterprises. "Terrorist attacks are a possibility in any of the companies we follow."
But several of the incidents involved UPS planes and at least one UPS truck - and to Ross, that the message he got from it was this:
"Biggest transportation company in the world."
UPS is larger than FedEx, he said. The amount of cargo it transports across the globe is titanic, whether it be retail merchandise, industrial merchandise or other goods.
"They're moving it all," Ross said. "They move a good percentage of GDP every day."
UPS and FedEx both have "very good security in general," Ross said. But they have "hundreds of thousands of vehicles across the world."
A package truck in New York City is one thing, he said. But an attack on a UPS hub could be "really bad."