The American lessons on aviation security have been hard-earned. I was the ranking member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation subcommittee in Congress on Sept. 11, 2001, and after that tragic day, government, industry, and safety advocates came together to demand change. I coauthored the bill that created the Transportation Security Administration and thanks to this law and the incredible work of thousands of TSA officers, we have prevented terrorist attacks and saved lives. But time has passed, and some have forgotten why these hard-won advances were enacted in the aftermath of 9/11.
Every year, tens of thousands of “scheduled charter” flights are exploiting a loophole in the law to bypass the standard TSA screenings that every airline passenger is accustomed to. This is creating an unacceptable security vulnerability and TSA must take swift action before disaster strikes. And the vulnerability grows by the day. In 2013, there were just over 6,000 scheduled charter flights, but by 2022, that number had ballooned to more than 106,000 flights, a more 1,600 percent increase. That means more and more scheduled charter operations are happening that skirt TSA.
A carrier called JSX is the leading cause of that growth. They did not exist a decade ago, but now operate tens of thousands of flights a year — without sending a single one of its passengers through the TSA screening process.
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