Los Angeles Times and Associated Press
WASHINGTON — With the year’s busiest travel period just days away, President Bush signed into law Monday a wide-ranging aviation security bill that he said "should give all Americans greater confidence when they fly."
The president also said he will seek additional security measures for other forms of travel. He did not offer specifics, but numerous proposals are pending in Congress to provide millions of dollars to increase security at bus and rail facilities and seaports.
A few of the new aviation law’s provisions have been implemented, such as fortified cockpit doors. But it will take the Department of Transportation a year or more to hire and train an estimated 28,000 employees to screen passengers and their luggage.
The measure calls for other new security features, including the hiring of thousands of air marshals, the screening of all checked bags by explosive-detection machines by December 2002 and rigorous background checks on ground-support personnel.
Airlines will be required to turn over to the U.S. Customs Service advance lists of passengers on international flights.
In the longer term, trusted-passenger programs will be implemented, using new technologies to identify passengers and expedite screening.
"For our airways, there is one supreme priority: safety," Bush said during the bill-signing ceremony at Reagan National Airport in suburban Virginia. It was the third time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that Bush has visited a busy airport to promote flying.
The law’s implementation is to be supervised by an as-yet unnamed undersecretary of Transportation.
A number of other measures have been taken since Sept. 11 to improve the safety of air travel, including patrols of airport checkpoints by the National Guard, a "zero-tolerance" government crackdown on security breaches and nighttime sweeps of aircraft on the ground by the airlines.
The law requires all the new screeners to be federal employees, and civil service rules require all such employees to be U.S. citizens.
Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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