The forthcoming answer was that if airports did not file their amendment to part 107 by January 6, 1973, they were subject to action by the FAA. And if they did not comply by February 6, 1973, they were subject to penalties of $1,000 for each aircraft operation boarded. How could small cities like Elko or Ely pay penalties of $1,000 per day; or Reno $16,000 per day; or Las Vegas $125,000 per day?

All airport management wants to immediately stop hijacking: It endangers many lives, it endangers millions of dollars of equipment, it endangers the predominant public transportation system in the United States, it endangers millions of jobs, and it endangers the economy of the entire country.

Airports will comply with the emergency order, but there are better ways to achieve the same results.

We do not feel that a head tax is the way to solve the problem. But under the present system, many cities are being forced to introduce such a tax or charge to finance the security force burden.

We support S. 39 to provide one Federal airport security force that is adequately federally funded and trained.

Senator CANNON. Thank you.

Chief Jacka?

Mr. JACKA. Mr. Chairman, I will touch briefly on a few comments that the other members of the group have mentioned to you today, particularly the stress that is placed on law enforcement insofar as hiring in such a short period of time. It takes some 2 months to determine whether or not, in fact, an individual is qualified to become a law enforcement officer. In our particular instance in Clark County, we operate a joint academy between the city police department and sheriff's office, 13 weeks in duration.

This only qualifies that recruit for the very bare minimum that he is responsible for. He is assigned thereafter to a senior officer for approximately 1 year. As Mr. Taylor indicated, the Clark County sheriff's department intends to implement the program pursuant to FAA direction by February 6. However, in doing that, we must take officers from the street, and in today's society with the emphasis on law and order, and high crime rate problems, this simply transfers the problem from one point to another.

We in law enforcement feel that the problem should not be ours, but rather that of the Federal Government. Particularly when it comes to liability, the sheriff in our county is responsible for the acts of our deputies. In that function, he has been sued on many occasions down to the lowest man. It places not only the sheriff, but the individual officer as well as the entity for whom he works, in extreme jeopardy. Mr. Chairman, it is difficult enough now to function as law enforcement officials. Please don't add to the responsibility in a needless manner. Thank you.

Senator CANNON. Mr. Ford?

Mr. FORD. Very briefly, Mr. Chairman, I would like to report on the activities of the Legal Committee of AOCI which has made a recommendation to the board of directors of AOCI that appropriate action be brought to rescind the Administrator's order. We believe that that order can be attacked on at least two grounds, first of all that there may be a lack of authority within the statutes for him to issue such an

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order against the local airport operators, and second, and we think this particular point is particularly strong, that it was an arbitrary and capricious order because it was issued with such little opportunity for the parties to participate in the rulemaking proceeding. There was none at all, and it did not provide reasonable time for implementation, considering the factors that were involved.

Senator CANNON. What point in time in' relation to the desist order were the airport operators notified of the impending emergency regulation?

Mr. FORD. Seems to me-and perhaps the others could comment on this that there was a preliminary meeting in November sometime, was there not?

Mr. REILLY. Mr. Chairman, no one in the aviation industry really knew what this order was going to be until it came out publicly on December 5 and went into effect the next day. We had heard rumors they were going to do something, everyone had suppositions, everybody had 20 or 30 rumors, but nobody actually knew.

Senator CANNON. Did you have any opportunity to testify in hearings on the proposal?

Mr. REILLY. None whatsoever.

Senator CANNON. You didn't even know what the proposals were? Mr. REILLY. That is correct.

Mr. FORD. I would like to touch on some points stressed to the board. A number of airports lack the police power. That is, they do not have the authority to appoint the kinds of officers required by this order. Obviously, they cannot comply unless they can on some sort of negotiated basis talk the local police chief or sheriff into providing these law enforcement officers for them.

As mentioned before, some of them lack the authority to enforce Federal statutes. In some States, and I think properly so, the State law requires stringent screening and training for law enforcement officers before they are commissioned, and I think it is interesting to note, at least parenthetically, that the Congress, itself, has devoted a lot of effort to try and upgrade law enforcement in the United States and provide funds to local communities to carry that out.

Here we have what might be characterized as an order to create an instant force of vigilantes. Many airports, of course, have budgetary restrictions, and they have laws that don't permit them to appropriate funds on any kind of an interim or emergency basis. Other airports have problems in modifying their physical facilities to meet these requirements. You have to set up these checkpoints. In some cases in making the modifications to their physical plants, they are violating fire codes and creating hazards that are also dangerous to the public. These factors have not been taken into consideration and weighed in consideration of what is the proper approach.

Other airports have contractual relationships with concessionaires and bondholders that will be violated by the types of security regulations being placed here. There, of course, will be liability flowing to the airport from those breaches of their contractual relationships. Finally and perhaps most important to lawyers is the legal liability question, and the chief mentioned this. There is the legal liability of the individual officers and their superiors and also the legal liability

of the airport. And most airports, being proprietary in nature, do not have immunity which would be the case with a Federal agency. Senator CANNON. Does the association have any present plans to test the legality of the order?

Mr. FORD. This is our recommendation which is going to the full AOCI board of directors which will meet next week. What their action will be I can't tell you, but we have recommended to them strongly that appropriate action be brought to test the order.

Now, the other way it may be tested is if the FAA is foolish enough to try to collect some of these penalties and they are threatening airports around the country with penalties. I am sure there will be a test in that case.

Senator CANNON. Does the association have any recommendations to make to the committee with respect to legislative remedies?

Mr. FORD. Well, of course, being a lawyer, it would be wonderful if Congress would make it crystal clear exactly what authority they are delegating to local governments in this area. That may be too much to hope for.

Senator CANNON. This committee tried to make that perfectly clear, of course.

Mr. FORD. I think it is interesting, Mr. Chairman, how much authority administrators have when they want to exercise it, and how little they have when they want to avoid responsibility.

Senator CANNON. Well, now, S. 39 contemplates establishment of a security force adequate in size to provide law enforcement at the Nation's airline airports. Obviously, because of limitations on funds and adverse cost effective factors, we didn't expect that the Federal officers would be available and present at all of the 531 air-carrier airports. We did assume that at smaller airports, the FAA could enter into agreements with local authorities to provide police protection for operations and that such authorities would be deputized by the administrator and trained by him to perform service so we would have standard operations throughout as was not had in the case we heard about a few moments ago.

I would like to ask you if your association believes this concept to be feasible, to use this kind of procedure at the smaller airport.

Mr. BEAN. Absolutely, on a long-base operation. On February 6, we can't perform miracles. It is impossible to produce the volumes. We thought the great fanfare that went along with issuing these regulations was very ill advised because if we had been consulted in advance, we would have pointed out these problems and could have gradually worked them out.

Now we are going to have ineffective followthrough on the regulation. I don't know how the law enforcement officer's presence can be effected between now and February 6 regardless of

Senator CANNON. There is no way, according to what Chief Jacka has said, to train these people in that short period of time and have them on duty and effectively operating. You must either take people from regular law enforcement duties or assignments, and assign them to this, or if you don't already have these people, you will have to hire them.

Mr. BEAN. At my own airport, Tampa International, we are using existing forces but, as is being done in Las Vegas, we are taking people away from other important duties. We are going to utilize overtime, our men will work 60-hour weeks, which we don't think is desirable. Rather than have the airlines come to us and tell us, we have rationed policemen to them and told them you will have to prescreen where the policemen are rather than have the policemen where the prescreening is. And this condition will exist for at least 6 months.

Senator CANNON. Have you had any reaction to your request for an extension of time on the effective date of the order so far?

Mr. BEAN. I don't believe there have been any answers. If I might clarify something. Senator Cannon, we have heard some statistics as to the request for extensions. They can be very deceiving. The implication would be everybody is complying.

At Tampa, we did not ask for extension. We submitted the plan. We will implement by February 6. If they approve it, fine, we don't need an extension. If they come back and say we need even one more man, I will have to ask for extension.

Senator CANNON. They haven't acted on your plan yet?
Mr. BEAN. No, not on our plans yet.

Senator CANNON. What about your plan, Mr. Taylor?

Mr. TAYLOR. We spoke with Los Angeles, San Diego, and Palm Springs. That is why we asked the Administrator if there was anything we could leave adjustment to; and when he said we were going to be liable to the charge, we left it there and went home and wrote our letter and sent it in.

Senator CANNON. But you haven't heard?

Mr. TAYLOR. No.

Mr. REILLY. The plans weren't due until January 6, and they haven't had time to look at them yet.

Senator Cook. May I get into that?

All you gentlemen that are administrators and that have submitted plans for the upgrading of your airports, have submitted plans whereby you were improving your airport facilities on a matching basis.

Now, can you give me some kind of an explanation of events within a logical time frame describing your original program submission until the time you got it approved?

You see the point that I am really trying to make is that here is another great big beautiful bureaucracy in which its Secretary; Mr. Volpe stands before the American public and says "we are going to save you, and we are going to see to it that nothing happens any more, and you are going to be safe in the air" while in essence he was talking from an airplane that had a cracked wing.

Now, 531 programs have got to be submitted to the FAA.

Just how long do you think it is going to take the bureaucratic society at FAA to review 531 programs, and how many of them are they going to send back, and how many of them are you going to have to rework their programs, and just how asinine is the whole thing ultimately going to be? This is really what we are talking about, isn't it? Mr. BEAN. Yes, this is a part of the problem, we know well they can't intelligently review all 531 plans. As a matter of fact, Erle mentioned this in the meeting in Los Angeles with the regional directors. We set up meetings with every regional director in the FAA. In

the southern region, I don't remember the exact figure, but we were told there are still some 30 basic security plans which we were required to file many months ago that have not been acted on. These airports are now going to submit an amendment to a plan not yet acted on. Senator Cook. That is correct. Did you have a concourse program in your airport early in October?

Mr. SHAY. No, sir.

Senator Cook. I might say to you that in my own city of Louisville, Ky., money was spent for various facilities that are located down the concourses for sale of items to the public. Now it has become necessary to put the facilities further down the concourse thereby eliminating the usage of many gates at the Louisville Airport which of necessity were built because they were needed for in and out transportation.

We are now, for instance, down at the Eastern Air Lines facility, only able to use two gates and yet others up and down the concourse remain unused. The reason for all of this is that we had to move the facilities for inspection so far down that we could only use two mobile gate systems at the end of one concourse.

You know if we are talking about special interest, Mr. Chairman, you have got a special interest here, it is going to cost you $1,276,000. You have got a special interest, $262,000. You have got a special interest, going to cost $565,000 at Las Vagas. I have got a special interest, it is going to cost $600,000 at Louisville. But let's admit all these things and still say the real special interest is that this is a problem and program that should be faced on a Federal basis and not piecemeal to the local agencies throughout the United States. Placing this burden on the local airports in a nonuniform manner is not unlike setting up various individual rent a car agencies. And in light of the fact that the Federal Government controls which airlines fly into an airport, which airports are to be licensed; and what tower procedures are to be used, it is totally illogical to place this burden on the local airports.

Mr. SHAY. We concur.

Senator Cook. One other statement I would like to make because I think all you gentleman remember very vividly, as I do Mr. Chairman, the arguments which occurred when Mr. Volpe was here the last time. We were debating this financial subject and we were talking about the $3 million to $4 million, necessary to buy the security equipment at which time the Secretary absolutely bolted. He said that the equipment should be bought by the airlines, and that they should be bought by the local agencies but you will notice in his emergency release on December 5, 1972 he bragged that the DOT has purchased 1100 walk through detectors and 1185 hand-held units and that the Department is prepared to buy enough additional screening devices to equip all airports and yet, we couldn't get him to agree to do that last year.

Senator CANNON. Thank you very much, gentlemen.

The hearing will stand in recess until 2:30 this afternoon.

AFTERNOON SESSION

Senator CANNON. The hearings will come to order.

The next witness this afternoon is Mr. Russell Hoyt, Executive Vice-president of the American Association of Airport Executives.