In the five years since terrorists flew four commercial airlines into targets in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania, the threat of future attacks hasn't ended. Fred Chasney knows it won't ever go away. But the airline security official has made it his mission to never let a Sept. 11 happen again.
"It's one of those jobs where you'll never brush off your hands and say, 'That's it. We're safe,'" said Chasney, the assistant federal security director with the Transportation Security Administration at Lansing Capital City Airport.
A retired U.S. Marine, Chasney spent 20 years in the military before becoming a financial adviser at a Lansing-area brokerage firm. But on Sept. 11, 2001, as he watched the attack unfold, he knew he needed to make a change.
Upon learning of the creation of the Transportation Security Administration — a unit of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security formed in response to the attacks — Chasney waited for a position to open in Lansing. He now splits his time between Lansing and MBS International Airport in Freeland, located near Midland, Bay City and Saginaw.
"I lost interest in what I was doing (professionally)," he said. "I no longer wanted to be in that realm. I wanted to be in national security in some way, shape or form."
Chasney now is responsible for overseeing passenger and baggage screening operations, managing security personnel and ensuring that the airport's procedures are in line with federal guidelines.
In the five years since, Chasney said, flying has become significantly safer. All baggage is screened before being loaded onto the airplane — a change from the "very small percentage" that was hand-checked pre-Sept. 11, he said — and screening equipment has been upgraded.
And that's all before leaving the airport.
Additional improvements include increasing the numbers of air marshals aboard commercial flights and arming more pilots in the cockpit, he said.
"Our mission is to detect and to thwart any type of threat against us," he said. "I don't want anybody to think that I'm faulting the system we had before, but the reality of what happened on 9/11 showed us that we needed to do things differently."
