Box Cutters Found On More Planes

Box cutters were found on US Airways planes in Boston and Philadelphia on Tuesday, and federal officials said they were investigating how the tools made it on board. It was the second such discovery on U.S. aircraft in less than a month.

In Boston, the flight crew found a box cutter on a US Airways Express plane and it was turned over to authorities, said Deborah Thompson, spokeswoman for US Airways.

The flight had arrived from Rockland, Maine, and had no passengers aboard, said Ann Davis, spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration. The plane was allowed to leave for Syracuse, N.Y.

In Philadelphia, passengers were evacuated from a plane after the box cutter was found. The bladed tool was found tucked inside a seat-back pouch on a US Airways jet that had arrived from Houston and was about 20 minutes away from a scheduled departure for Phoenix, Davis said.

A passenger spotted the box cutter and pointed it out to the crew, Davis said. Authorities were trying to find out whether the blade was left on the aircraft accidentally by a worker or smuggled through security by a passenger.

About 80 passengers were asked to leave the plane and make a second pass through the airport's security screening system before boarding another flight, said Philadelphia International Airport spokesman Mark Pesce.

US Airways spokesman John Bronson said the case was under investigation.

Box cutters have been banned from commercial airline flights since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Earlier this month, federal authorities ordered all commercial flights searched after suspicious bags containing box cutters, bleach, matches and modeling clay, were found in lavatory compartments aboard Southwest Airlines jets that landed in New Orleans and Houston.

Nathaniel Heatwole of Damascus, Md., has been charged in federal court in Baltimore with taking a dangerous weapon aboard an aircraft. The government says Heatwole spirited box cutters onto two airplanes and then told the Transportation Security Administration what he did in an e-mail.

Last week, the Bush administration pledged to move more aggressively against potential threats in the wake of the Heatwole incident.

According to an FBI affidavit, on Sept. 15, the TSA received an e-mail from Heatwole saying he had "information regarding six security breaches" at the Raleigh-Durham and Baltimore-Washington airports between Feb. 7 and Sept. 14.

In the e-mail, Heatwole wrote that he had put the items aboard two specific Southwest flights as an act of civil disobedience to expose weaknesses in the security system, the FBI affidavit said.

Heatwole's e-mail provided details of where the plastic bags were hidden — right down to the exact dates and flight numbers — along with Heatwole's name and telephone number.

The objects were not found until more than a month later.

Heatwole, who is out on bail, faces up to 10 years in prison.

The incident has produced calls in Congress for hearings into the performance of the TSA.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, whose department includes TSA, said the agency gets a high volume of e-mails about possible threats and officials decided that Heatwole "wasn't an imminent threat."

From now on, a TSA official said last week the agency will automatically single out for response any threatening communication and will seek to better train its employees on how to recognize such messages.

"One of the system weaknesses that we've discovered since this is that a center that is essentially designed to receive incoming consumer communications was not set up to flag a communication like the e-mail that Mr. Heatwole sent," TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield told CBS' Early Show "We've taken steps to address that both on the automatic flagging and on the manual response that the operators in that center will be able to do in the future."

Hatfield conceded that the TSA must help its employees become more capable of recognizing the threatening messages among some 5,700 complaints, queries, compliments and other comments that flow daily into the agency's Contact Center.