ABC Finance

CAHOKIA — On many days, St. Louis Downtown Airport is a beehive of activity, with enough takeoffs and landings to rank as the third-busiest airfield in Illinois behind only Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports.

Corporate jets shuttle businessmen en route to meetings. Medical flights carry patients and transplant organs. Pilots sharpen their skills on training flights.

Now the federal government wants to impose tighter security requirements on general aviation airports, like St. Louis Downtown, and operators of larger noncommercial aircraft to prevent those planes from becoming targets of terrorism.

After a strong push back from business aviation groups, officials at the Transportation Security Administration said the agency may revise some of the security measures it proposed in October.

Those measures, for instance, would force operators of corporate jets weighing more than 12,500 pounds at takeoff to increase their scrutiny of passengers and crew members, and comply with the TSA’s prohibited items list.

Airports serving the larger aircraft would have to draw up new security programs.

"What the large aircraft security program, as it was proposed, doesn’t take into account is what the aircraft is used for," said Bob McDaniel, director at St. Louis Downtown Airport. "Airline security is the way that it is because the airline that owns the airplane, the pilot who’s flying the airplane, has no idea who’s riding there."

By contrast, McDaniel and others say, business aircraft pilots and passengers are known to the plane’s owner.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, McDaniel said his airport has taken steps to improve security beyond what is required. Steps have included improved perimeter fencing, badges for people working there and a network security system at all entry points.

While the original proposal wouldn’t force extensive upgrades to the St. Louis Downtown Airport, business aviation groups say some of the measures would prove costly to aircraft operators. Those include labor costs of launching a new security program, and outside audits, said Ed Bolen, president of the National Business Aviation Association.

Like commercial air carriers, business aviation already has been hit hard by the global recession, Bolen said cash advance no fax. He added that the TSA is trying to apply security measures designed for commercial airlines to small, private aircraft.

During a hearing this week of the House Subcommittee on Transportation Security and Infrastructure Protection, a top TSA official said the agency has met with industry groups and is working to revise the proposed security measures. New or revised security rules should be released in the upcoming months.

"We recognize there is general aviation risk," said John Sammon, an assistant administrator at the TSA. "We are developing a series of sensible security measures to minimize risk."

In October, the TSA warned that the security buildup at commercial airports might prompt terrorist organizations to turn their attention to general-aviation aircraft.

"If hijacked and used as a missile, these aircraft would be capable of inflicting significant damage," the TSA wrote.

But the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security has reported that "general aviation presents only limited and mostly hypothetical threats to security." Other reports have come to the same conclusion.

Carlton Mann, an assistant inspector general, added that a November 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office found that "the small size, lack of fuel capacity and minimal destructive power of most general aviation aircraft make them unattractive to terrorists," reducing the threat associated with their misuse.

McDaniel and others believe business aviation was singled out unfairly by the original rules.

"We seem to be stuck on an aviation threat," McDaniel said. "The operators that will fall underneath the proposed program are your most security-conscious. There is a reason so many corporations have their own private jets. And security is the No. 1 reason.

"You don’t have to worry about who’s listening over your shoulder or reading your laptop while you’re sitting in that airline seat."

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