Kempner: Ex-airport screening CEO gets an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment

— The TSA has to approve privatization applications from airports.

— The TSA can take 120 days to review applications. The contract award process can take a year. The transition could take another six months.

— Private screening vendors work for the TSA, not the airport, and must meet TSA directives and comply with TSA oversight.

— According to the TSA, performance measure between the private and government screeners “is comparable.”

— 22 U.S. airports have private contractor screeners, though most are smaller. The largest is San Francisco International.

Source: TSA

With crazy-long airport security lines expected this summer, one dapper Atlantan has imagined what he’d do if he once again was the biggest tycoon in the U.S. airport screening business.

For starters, he wouldn’t hire college grads to monitor x-ray machines.

“They are the worst possible screeners on Earth,” Frank Argenbright told me. “You wouldn’t last 30 days … You’d be pulling your hair out. Stress, right?”

The perfect screener, according to what researchers told him: A high school graduate who is comfortable with repetitive tasks and earning bonus money for every real and fake weapon they find.

Argenbright’s current $160-million-a-year security business focuses mostly on commercial buildings these days, and he insists he has no plan to return to airport screening. Not after his name was trashed following 9/11. Not after all the stress and the thoughts back then about killing himself.

He was the Argenbright in Argenbright Security, which provided contract screening at 182 airports and 40 percent of the U.S. market prior to 9/11. The company’s missteps — some real and some apparently overstated — became an emblem of weak U.S. airport security, which helped fuel creation of the Transportation Security Administration and its federal takeover of passenger screening.

Argenbright had actually sold his screening business months before the terrorist attacks, but it was still the company he had built.

Now, I’m wondering if the 68-year-old might be tempted to jump back in.

He told me he mentioned the idea to his wife a few days ago as officials around the nation talked about hiring private screening companies in hopes their workers would do a better, faster job than federal TSA employees.

Argenbright’s spouse of nearly 37 years doesn’t want him to do it. They’ve been through enough of that.

“My wife would kill me,” he told me.

He repeated that phrase at least four times in our chat, as if he was trying to remind himself.

A tempting thought

It’s tempting to think that private business could do better than the feds.

Even a liberal mayor like Kasim Reed said he'll keep pursuing the idea at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Officials from Chicago to New York and Charlotte to Seattle have said the same.

It’s hard to know if they are just posturing so they can push TSA to fix airport lines that have prompted some travelers to get to airports three hours before flights, and caused others to miss theirs entirely.

I imagine this could be an I-told-you-so moment for a guy like Argenbright.

He didn’t quite go that far, but he noted that when private screening companies mess up, they lose their contracts. If government agencies mess up, “there’s nothing anybody can do to them.”

As he imagines privatization, detection of weapons would go way up (because companies could make better hires and would have a financial motive to excel) and costs would go way down (because they could get good workers with less education and pay them less and provide fewer benefits).

Yeah, that seems counterintuitive.

But he argued it would work and that the saved dollars could be used to hire more screeners who would speed up security lines. Private companies also might have more flexibility than the TSA does with its crew of unionized screeners, he said.

Douglas Laird, an aviation security consultant, said with screeners “it doesn’t matter how smart you are or how much you are paid.” Instead, it’s about whether you have the skill to recognize visually when something is out of kilter. FAA research from years ago suggested that college-educated screeners weren’t the best candidates, he said, echoing Argenbright.

Laird said he suspects private screeners and TSA line workers would have about the same rates of detecting hidden weapons and explosives. That’s also what the TSA says.

As for Argenbright’s own screening operations years ago, Laird said, “I don’t think they were the best, but they were good.”

That’s not how it looked after 9/11.

Tough questions raised

The specter of terrorists wielding box cutters as they took over passenger jets raised tough questions about the company he started. At least some of the terrorists went through airports where Argenbright staff handled screening.

It was never proven how the box cutters made it on the planes. Though small box cutters were allowed at the time, Argenbright said he thinks his workers would have questioned the terrorists if they’d been carrying them. He contends the cutters were stashed on the jets the day before. But that’s conjecture. One government investigation found Argenbright workers didn’t properly check one of the terrorists.

Others highlighted serious safety flaws that occurred when Argenbright still owned the business, such as poor training and dozens of felons being hired as screeners in Philadelphia. The FAA had fined the company, which was put on probation, according to news reports.

Argenbright’s name was tarnished, even though he’d sold the business nine months before 9/11. Another business he ran lost hundreds of millions of dollars in value as a result, he said.

But he’s been rebuilding. His current company, Atlanta-based SecurAmerica, has 7,000 employees. He wants to turn it into a billion-dollar business within five years. He also launched a company that handled airport services, though not screening. He later sold that operation and agreed to a non-compete clause that bars him from providing airport services until late next year.

“I don’t want to go back in the screening business,” Argenbright assured me. But he told me he could handle it if he wanted to. “We are wiser, smarter.”