Tourism Talk
Security changes must make travelers believe flying safe again

By Michele Kayal
Advertiser Staff Writer

In those long, tense days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when planes were banned from U.S. airspace, the Kaua'i Visitors Bureau had an unusual request from a Mainland travel agent: How could she charter a boat to California for a client desperate to get home?

The answer, of course, was that she couldn't.

Tourists in Florida didn't have that problem. Neither did tourists in California or Las Vegas. But in Hawai'i, unless you're on a cruise, the only way in or out is by plane. And that's why Hawai'i may suffer more than any other destination in the United States unless people can regain their faith in flying.

In 1946, every one of Hawai'i's 15,000 visitors arrived by sea. Less than 25 years later, 98 percent of all visitors came by air, and their numbers had topped 1.5 million. As Jeff Coelho, general manager of KUMU Radio and KAHA Radio, so succinctly put it to the Senate tourism committee last week, "The jumbo jet created the Hawai'i we know today, and the jumbo jet will take it away. It's the safety of the jumbo jet you gotta sell."

The president is begging people to fly. He's sending Cabinet secretaries up on commercial jets to prove that they're safe. Because getting on a plane — something we all did frequently, unflinchingly — now has become an act of bravery and patriotism.

And it became that way largely through previous failures. More than a decade ago, in the wake of Pan Am 103, Congress passed the Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990, which required screening, training and testing of airport security crews, among other measures. After the 1996 tragedy of TWA 800, originally thought to be the work of terrorists, Americans discovered that little of what was in the 1990 law had actually been carried out.

So Congress passed another law covering much of the same ground. And a special White House commission made more than 50 recommendations for things like computer-assisted passenger profiling that would better identify terrorists, expanding the role of customs, the FBI, and the CIA in detecting terrorists, and (again) better screening, training and testing of airport security personnel.

Now, President Bush promises to put federal marshals on more flights, strengthen cockpit doors, and — guess what — to better screen, train and pay airport security personnel. House and Senate lawmakers may act on airport security legislation as soon as this week.

One can only hope that past is not prologue this time around. Because, as Coelho put it, " 'Aloha' is not going to make someone from Sacramento bring their kids here if they don't know it's safe to get on that plane."

Hawai'i has already begun to make changes. Passengers at Honolulu International are being patted down and searched with hand-held metal detectors. ID must be shown at the ticket counter and at the baggage screening machines. Non-passengers can't go to the gate. And Gov. Cayetano has pledged to put National Guard troops at the airports.

It's possible some of these measures could unnerve visitors. But it's more likely they'll take comfort in them, the way they seem to feel safer with a police presence in Waikiki.

The governor's special three-man commission is expected to roll out its emergency "Come Back to Hawai'i" plan later this week, and the governor will soon take a crew to Japan to entice travelers and tell them they're welcome here, as well as safe.

But how do you communicate safety and security to potential visitors without saying it out loud, which would be unseemly and, for the superstitious, a temptation to the fates.

And once you've communicated it, how do you ensure security without humiliating visitors the way Sikh priest Baba Amar Singh was humiliated when airport personnel forced him to remove his turban, an unthinkable act in his religion?

These are complicated questions, and this time around mere marketing is not going to solve them. This particular effort, this particular piece of image-making, must go beyond perception engineering. Hawai'i's airports must actually be safer, not just look safer.

Because the American public — and fliers all over the world, for that matter — are unlikely to put up with another round of security talk that turns out to be tragic rhetoric.

And Hawai'i, isolated, fragile, and dependent on tourism, will suffer more than anyone.

Michele Kayal can be reached at mkayal@honoluluadvertiser.com