Public Profile
The Center for Aviation Threat Posture Studies is a private research institute in Arlington, Virginia, devoted to the study of what its founding statement calls “the stance a transportation system adopts toward the threats it has chosen to imagine.” It was founded in 2019 by Dr. Philip Marchetti, formerly the chief risk officer of the Transportation Security Administration, and employs a staff of eleven, nine of whom previously worked for the agency and two of whom previously worked for its inspector general.
The Center occupies the fourth floor of an office building on Wilson Boulevard, within sight of the Pentagon and a short drive from Reagan National Airport, a location it describes as “convenient.” It is funded by a consortium of domestic carriers, an association of airport operators, and two foundations whose names do not appear on its website. It publishes an annual Posture Index, which rates the screening regimes of forty-one countries on a scale from “Detective” to “Deterrent” and which has, in every year since its inception, placed the United States at a point on the scale the Center describes as “unresolved.”
The Center’s research program concerns the gap between what a checkpoint is designed to find and what passes through it, a subject on which its staff are unusually well informed and unusually constrained. Its published work consists largely of methodology papers whose results have been withheld at the request of the agency that supplied the data. The Center has described this arrangement as “the posture problem, applied to us.”
In October 2026 the Center provided the first independent assessment of a Gahanna, Ohio, man’s proposal to replace checkpoint screening with a bowl of knives at every jetway, which Dr. Marchetti characterized as a shift from detection to deterrence and declined to recommend.
Articles
- Ohio Man Unveils Plan to Replace T.S.A. Screening With a Bowl of Knives at Every Jetway — its director assessed the proposal
Articles
- Ohio Man Unveils Plan to Replace T.S.A. Screening With a Bowl of Knives at Every Jetway — “Like a library book, but for stabbing,” Mr. Henderson said of the return procedure, which he described as self-policing.