FAA Speeds Hiring of Air Marshals

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has chosen Teleform forms processing software from Cardiff (www.cardiff.com), Vista, CA, to expedite the process of hiring federal air marshals.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 compelled the FAA to find, screen and hire new air marshals as quickly as possible. By mid-November, the FAA had received approximately 81,000 applications with a total of nearly one million pages of documentation. To meet critical security deadlines, the FAA turned to Cardiff's data capture software to accelerate processing. Cardiff says it worked with the FAA to fine-tune its system to handle as many as 4,000 applications per day.

"Our system had to make it easy to apply, yet make it possible to collect the pages of personal information required to process applicants," stated Susan Bounds, manager of the FAA's Aviation Careers Division. "The system combines Cardiff Teleform, Adobe PDF and Oracle."

Prospective air marshals access and print out PDF-based application forms at jobs.faa.gov. The completed 12-page applications are mailed to the FAA's Mike Monroney of the Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City, where they are scanned. Teleform's recognition technologies automate data collection from the document images, and the system then exports the information to an Oracle database accessible to FAA human resources personnel.

> Read more Tech Selections <