OTTAWA - Airport screeners should pay less attention to what passengers are carrying aboard planes and more attention to the kind of people carrying them, the Air India inquiry has been told.
Craig Hall and Jean Labbe of the Air Line Pilots Association International say their group favours behavioural profiling to weed out high-risk passengers.
The concept has been proposed by other witnesses at the hearings.
But there are worries that, without careful training of screening personnel, such a program could degenerate into legally unacceptable racial profiling.
Hall and Labbe also say Canada should look at instituting a registered traveller program that would speed frequent and low-risk flyers through the screening process.
That would allow more time to concentrate on others who present a greater risk.
The inquiry, headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major, is examining airport security as part of its investigation of the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182 that took 329 lives.
The attack was blamed on militant Sikh separatists, but only one man has ever been convicted in the plot.
