Unions question plane maintenance abroad 
WASHINGTON (PAI) - Citing security concerns, the Teamsters, the Machinists, the Transport Workers and the AFL-CIO asked the federal government to suspend U.S. airplane maintenance overseas.

They told Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, FAA Administrator Marion Blakey and Transportation Security Administration chief James Loy in an April 10 letter that security safeguards at most of the 600 foreign aircraft maintenance stations are unknown and that workers at those stations have not undergone security checks.

By contrast, domestic maintenance stations and workers have been cleared, said Transportation Trades Department and TWU President Sonny Hall and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard L. Trumka in their letter. As of April 15, there has been no reply.

"The State Department and other agencies frequently warned about threats occurring outside the U.S. but directed at U.S. citizens and interests. We are concerned that certified foreign aircraft repair stations...eligible to work on U.S. aircraft could provide terrorists with an opportunity to jeopardize U.S. aviation safety without having to enter this country," they said.

The Transportation Department's own inspector general "found security vulnerabilities" at the foreign repair stations, they noted. They added that the financially ailing airline industry might increase the risk by trying to outsource more repairs to the overseas stations, where labor costs are lower.

In fact, Northwest Airlines, using its contract with an independent mechanics union - which ousted the Machinists several years ago - has outsourced 40 percent of its DC-10 repairs to Singapore.

Unmanned trains A terrorist threat, too?
While we're on the subject of potential terrorist threats, here's another one no one thinks about: the use of unmanned train locomotives.

Several hundred unionists rallied against the unmanned locomotives in March outside the offices of the Federal Railroad Administration in Washington.

Ralf Schultz, a member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Local 458, told PAI that "he could walk into a rail yard" on Chicago's West Side right now "and steal a locomotive." And so, for that matter, could an al-Qaeda terrorist.

There are a number of engineers around the country who don't spend any time looking out the windshield of a locomotive in a freight yard - they're operating engines by computer with a mouse from a control tower. The locomotives are empty.

The "engineers" are running the engines by computer mouse from control towers.

That development worries Schultz and union leaders. They say it leaves freight trains, many of them laden with hazardous materials, wide open to terrorist takeover.

BLE President James Hahs said, the major railroads want to expand" the area where unmanned locomotives can run up to 75 miles from a terminal. But even after 65 accidents involving the unmanned locomotives - including one that killed a rail worker in Syracuse, N.Y. - the federal agency refuses to require engineers on those locomotives.