Stolen tickets pose security risk, damage travel agents,
      Congressional panel told.
     WASHINGTON - Feb 27, 1998 12:08 p.m. EDT -- Stolen tickets give
 terrorists, drug dealers and illegal immigrants free rides on U.S.
 airlines, law enforcement officials told a Congressional panel
 Thursday, while travel agents pick up the tab -- sometimes going
 out of business in the process.
     Miami Police detective Gary Yallelus, who has investigated air-
 line ticket fraud for almost seven years, told the House aviation
 subcommittee that most of the 212,000 blank airline tickets reported
 stolen or lost last year were pilfered by an organized ring set up
 to steal, print and sell U.S. airline tickets.
     "Terrorism, money laundering, alien smuggling, drug smuggling
 and many other financial crimes are related to the use of stolen
 airline tickets," he told the panel.
     Yallelus called for a federal task force to fight "the highly
 organized criminal syndicate that has taken a grip on the travel
 industry."
     Thieves steal boxes of blank airline tickets, provided to travel
 agents by airlines, and pass them along to others who use home com-
 puters, printers and other equipment to fill in the coupons. The
 airlines say they have lost $5.2 million from 1997 robberies, but
 travel agents who testified warned that number could go significant-
 ly higher -- and complained that they are held responsible for the
 cost.
     The agents' agreements with the airlines make them responsible
 for lost or stolen tickets at a significant cost, which insurance
 doesn't cover.  Agents asked the House panel to consider capping
 their liability for the stolen tickets, but members of the subcom-
 mittee appeared reluctant to do so.
     "It's going to have to be addressed by the airlines and perhaps
 the travel agents being more diligent in protecting their ticket
 stock," said Illinois Rep. William Lipinksi, the ranking Democrat on
 the subcommittee.
     Travel agents say the airlines are doing very little to combat
 the problem because it's less costly for them to collect the value
 from the agents or simply write the tickets off as a loss.
                      E-ticketing in the future?
 Geraldine Gregorian of G.A.P. Travel lost her business over stolen
 tickets. She said she was told by one airline representative that
 the losses were her fault.
     "I put in 23 years of my life into the travel business, and I
 told her, 'With an alarm system, a motion detector, what else should
 I do? Should I sit there with a shotgun?'" Gregorian said. "She said
 if that's what it takes, then do it."
     Ticket agents and law enforcement officials urge the airlines to
 check ticket stock numbers for each boarding passenger, but airlines
 say that's just not feasible.
     "To run a series of numbers accurately, wait for the response, I
 think that is going to add some time," said Bill Schmidt, corporate
 security manager of American Airlines.
     The American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) has suggested better
 training for airline employees on how to spot bogus tickets, and
 implementation of ticket scanning systems. ASTA has also urged air-
 lines to be reasonable when assessing loss. That will happen, the
 airlines said through the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which
 provides travel agents with most of the blank tickets they use.
     "The airlines have made clear through ARC that in the event of a
 criminal act - other than by their own employees - such as burglary
 or theft, the travel agent will not be responsible for the stolen
 ticket stock, provided that the travel agent has followed ARC's
 ticket security rules," said ARC president David Collins.
     Short of adopting e-ticketing -- electronic ticketing without
 paper coupons -- across the board, however, the stolen ticket prob-
 lem is likely to continue.
 -------------------------------------------------------------------
          Singapore says no foul play seen in SilkAir crash
     SINGAPORE -- 28 Feb 1998 02:50 JST, Tokyo time -- Investigators
 have found no sign of foul play in Singapore's worst air crash, which
 killed 104 people last December, Communications Minister Mah Bow Tan
 said on Friday.
     "So far, the team has not uncovered any evidence or suspicion of
 foul play," he told parliament in a statement.
     A SilkAir Boeing 737-300 crashed while on a flight from Jakarta
 to Singapore on December 19, killing all 104 people on board.
     The 10-month-old plane, which had had a thorough maintenance
 check just 10 days before the crash, dropped out of the sky without
 getting off a distress message.
     Investigations in the U.S. and Indonesia by a team of Indonesian,
 Singaporean and American experts are still in progress, but a lack of
 useful data from the plane's two black boxes has made the task diffi-
 cult, Mah said.
     The investigators want to look more extensively into further
 analysis of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder.
     "We hope that this phase of the investigation will provide some
 clues to the cause of this tragic accident," the Singaporean Minister
 said.
     SilkAir, a fully owned unit of Singapore Airlines, services
 mainly regional routes. It was the first time one of its planes
 crashed.
 ===
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