Capt. Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA), issued the following statement:

"The recent incident of the stowaway who shipped himself as air freight has once again demonstrated the need for cargo airline security improvements. It further spotlights the need for the government to both mandate, and pay for, these changes.

"Shortly after 9/11, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta appointed me to his Rapid Response Team. I testified numerous times before Congress that cargo pilots and aircraft were more, not less, vulnerable to terrorist hijacking. They need reinforced cockpit doors, and the pilots' need to be armed against stowaways that could easily hide in containers. Indeed, entire teams can hide in a wide-body cargo container. This was ridiculed by airline cargo management as being farfetched. The recent event of a stowaway shipping himself in a plain wooden crate proved that it was not farfetched at all.

"As our struggle to get 'One Level of Security' for the entire air transport industry goes on, the fight to get adequate federal funding for any security from sources other than user fees gets more difficult every day because of budget deficits. Federal agencies are stinting on some programs to pay for others. We cannot afford to make security funding a zero-sum game.

"The second airline relief package passed by Congress last spring granted temporary relief from some security user fees. We need permanent relief from airline security costs. Security costs rightly belong under Homeland Security. To put it in perspective, a full year of airline security user fees equals one month of ongoing Iraqi expenses, calculated even before the additional $87 billion supplemental requests.

"On this second anniversary of the terrorist attacks we must pledge to never give up our goal of One Level of Security, paid for by general funds and not by user fees that often cannot be passed on to consumers. The Department of Defense is not funded by user fees, and neither should Homeland Security."

FMI: www.alpa.org