“The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics security plan is going to be the model of how not to do it. It’s going to go down in history as one of the most knee-jerk reactions to a crisis,” National Air Transportation Association president James Coyne told AIN. “We have a member of our board of directors who’s been working on this for over a year, and after all that time this plan comes from out of left field without any input from the business aviation community.”
In response, Richard Booth, the aviation enforcement program specialist for U.S. Customs, said every agency in the U.S. government was shocked by the September 11 terrorist attacks and was forced immediately to develop a new way of doing business. “Let me be candid,” he said. “The Olympics was just one of a multitude of concerns for U.S. Customs. When you start thinking about the window of time we had to make drastic changes in the way we protect our borders, you realize the Olympics was not our major concern. We had major border issues demanding immediate, drastic attention. All the agencies involved with the Olympics were in the same situation.”
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