Robert Crandall, the former CEO of American Airlines, during an interview by Neil Cavuto on Fox News, volunteered to take over TSA if necessary. He noted that political appointments at the highest levels of security organizations just don’t have the experience to run organizations as large as the Department of Homeland Security.
Crandall would find someone “that knows something about security, that knows something about transportation, and that has — has had experience running very large-scale organizations.”
His first suggestion was Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, “because Lou knows how to run things, and he knows as much about systems as anybody. And there are lots of good people out there.”
Ahh, now we are getting somewhere. What a wild suggestion! Hire someone qualified with experience running large organizations, who understands transportation and security.
Cavuto asked whether Crandall would take the job and he answered, “Of course I would.”
“Why do we continually put politicians into jobs they know nothing about, instead of selecting experienced managers to run very large-scale administrative organizations?” Crandall asked.
He answered his own rhetorical question, “I think the answer is that it doesn’t seem to matter much to the government whether these organizations run efficiently or not. And it should.”
The “best and brightest” the current administration could find to fill the top job at Transportation Security Administration with 60,000 employees is a man who has never headed a large organization; a man who personally rifled through confidential records of his estranged wife’s lover and then lied about it in testimony before Congress.
That’s very sad.
Finally, in terms of body scanners, Crandall had this to say, “What we need to do is, we need to differentiate between those people who are a risk and those people who are unlikely to be a risk. Let’s put the high-risk people through the body scanners. … You know, a body scanner is about $150,000. An X-ray machine is about $10,000. You’re not going to use on [everyone] … doing so is silly. It’s just a waste of resources and a waste of money.”
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
