Colorado Springs police Sgts. Gary Frasier and Micheal Cram emerged from the parked jetliner at Denver International Airport on Tuesday in bulky bomb-squad suits carrying X-rays of a black bag left under a rear seat in the cabin.
Frasier and Cram are members of the South Central Regional Explosives Unit and are among dozens of law enforcement and military personnel from across the state training this week at DIA with federal bomb specialists.
The techniques they are working on are especially useful for doing their job inside a plane’s cramped cabin.
“We’ve never had the opportunity to train in a real aircraft in confined spaces, to learn what will or won’t work,” Frasier said after stripping off the 70-pound Kevlar and ceramic-plated protective suit.
“A real event,” he said, “is not a good time to learn what your limitations are.”
They had taken portable X-ray equipment aboard the plane to try to verify the bag’s contents.
This week’s drills at DIA are part of a national effort to bring new techniques to local police squads for handling aviation bomb threats, said Patrick Tatman, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security explosive security specialist.
Tatman, 41, spent 21 years as a bomb technician in the U.S. Navy before joining the agency.
Tatman helped set up the bomb-detection exercise on the DIA jetliner, and he acted as a tutor for Frasier and Cram as they tried to decipher whether the X-ray showed elements of an explosive device.
Homeland Security’s program for training local bomb squads has been coupled with the Transportation Security Administration’s hiring “bomb appraisal officers” to help train security screeners to better recognize components of explosive devices. The bomb officers also help “resolve alarms” when a screener finds something suspicious.
A byproduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is that bomb-disposal experts are leaving the military with skills that can be transferred to civilian aviation and to police bomb squads that respond to threats at U.S. airports, said Mario Medina, the TSA’s bomb appraisal officer at DIA.
“Guys coming from a six-month tour in Iraq now have more experience than an average bomb squad will have in its entire career,” said Medina, who also trained at the Navy’s advanced Explosive Ordnance Disposal school and spent 19 years as a military bomb technician.
At the end of last year, there were 111 bomb appraisal officers at U.S. airports, but there will be 300 by the end of this year and 500 by the end of 2009, Medina said. DIA soon will have four more of the explosives specialists.
By teaching screeners better bomb-detection skills, bomb appraisal officers hope to reduce false alarms by screeners.
To that end, Medina opened a case he was carrying at DIA’s A concourse security checkpoint Tuesday and offered screeners Mike Hill and John Blackis a quick course in how to recognize detonators, blasting caps and other potential components of an improvised explosive device.
Medina makes the “inert training aids” and said one was similar to what men used in a June attack on Glasgow International Airport in Scotland.
“I build devices based on current threats, and we train on the identification of them,” he said.
Jeffrey Leib: 303-954-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com
