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Report questions value of high US aviation security costs

By Christine Boynton | August 21, 2012

US aviation security costs have skyrocketed since 9/11 but it is not certain the benefits outweigh those costs, a new industry report finds.

Authored by RAND Corp., the report suggests the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Congress should weigh both the costs and benefits of the complex US aviation security system.

TSA spent approximately $6.5 billion to protect the aviation system in the fiscal year 2011 and costs borne by airlines and passengers for security measures—including time spent in screening queues—are estimated to be $7.4 billion annually, the report said.

“Before the 2001 attacks … federal budgets for aviation security fell in the comparatively modest range of the low hundreds of millions of dollars in contrast to the billions today,” the study said.

“When the system being protected is as valuable economically as aviation, even a small reduction in its usefulness and value adds up quickly, making security potentially much more costly than might be assumed,” report co-author and senior RAND researcher Brian Jackson said.

Although it is possible to calculate how much is spent on scanners, screeners and other security measures, but less-tangible economic costs also occur because a lot of security makes the aviation system difficult to use, the report points out.

And while the US security system relies on a layered security strategy, more layers are not necessarily better than fewer.

“In some cases, layers can reinforce each other and be more effective than the sum of the individual measures on their own. In others, they can interfere with one another and provide less security together than they would have separately,” the report said.

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