Narrator: This is Bak, an explosives detection canine
for the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA.
Gary Stoerrle: Ready? Go seek.
Personally, I feel if my dog screened that person,
that I would put myself,
my family, or my mom on that plane.
My dog is that good that nothing has come past him.
Narrator: Every day, Bak and his handler, Gary,
will screen between 3,000 and 4,000 passengers
for explosives at Philadelphia International Airport.
But before Bak and Gary started working together
as an explosives detection team ...
Instructor: Very good. Feather, feather. Nice.
Narrator: They spent 16 weeks training here,
at the TSA Canine Training Center
at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
The TSA National Explosives Detection Canine Program
graduates more than 300 dogs
and more than 150 handlers every year.
They train in mock airplanes
and airport terminals,
where they learn crucial techniques
they'll have to master before graduating.
Zebulon Polasek: There is nothing more effective out there
in all of TSA's arsenal.
A well-trained dog team is truly a force multiplier
that really combats terrorism.
Narrator: There are more than 1,000
TSA canine teams deployed nationwide.
The starting pay for a handler is about $43,000 a year.
Polasek: So, the first thing where we start
is teaching the dog the basic fundamentals
of how to use their nose to find something.
And luckily for us, dogs already naturally do that.
So we just manipulate the environment
so we can tap into their natural abilities.
Narrator: One of those environments
is a mock wide-body aircraft similar to one
that they might encounter in the real world.
Uzi, a 2-year-old Belgian Malinois,
was around 20 days into training.
The dogs are first taught to search
for their favorite toy
and are rewarded once they find it.
Kevin Pitre: Ooh, you got it! Good mans.
You got it, puppy, you got it!
Polasek: Again, we buy these dogs for drive.
That dog is going to want that toy.
Pitre: Whoo! Good mans.
Good mans, good mans.
So as you can see, we're just kind of
using the reward to shape the behavior
and getting him used to going in, searching the rows.
Narrator: About 160 dogs are in training at any given time,
and they come in all shapes and sizes.
Polasek: Through years of trials and tribulations,
we have honed in on essentially seven different breeds.
So you have your Belgian Malinois,
your German shepherds.
We also have the Labrador retrievers,
the German shorthaired pointers, the vizslas,
those type of dogs.
And we've found that they have the innate ability,
both cognitively and with their olfactory,
that we have a lot of positive results
with those specific breeds.
Trainer: Up, seek. Up, seek.
Narrator: As the dogs progress,
trainers introduce training aids
filled with explosive materials
and reward the dogs for finding them.
Trainer: Good boy!
Narrator: This dog, Pupi,
a 2-year-old German shorthaired pointer,
was 70 days into training.
Through repeated exercises,
the dogs learn that detecting the odor earns them their toy
and begin searching for the odor itself.
John Peeler: We condition them that this piece
that you're looking for means a whole lot,
and we use the toy to do that.
So as a dog's going through and they're searching
and sniffing, when they catch that odor, that scent,
their body reacts as if we just gave them a toy.
So we teach our dogs what's called a passive final response.
So once they have worked and located something,
we teach them to either go into a sit or a down.
Pitre: Whoo!
Good mans.
Narrator: The roots of the program
date back to March 7, 1972,
when a bomb threat was called in
on a TWA flight right after it took off
from JFK International Airport,
forcing the plane to turn around and land.
Polasek: A team through the New York Police Department
trained to detect explosives
happened to be at JFK at the same time.
This canine named Brandy went onto the aircraft,
conducted a search, and alerted to what looked to be
a pilot's briefcase adjacent to the cockpit.
Explosive Ordnance Disposal came in,
grabbed the briefcase,
and disarmed it 12 minutes before it exploded.
Narrator: That same day, President Nixon ordered
the creation of the FAA Explosives Detection Canine Team,
which was transferred to the TSA following its creation
in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
Polasek: And through the years,
we have continued to grow as a program.
Narrator: Today, the TSA trains its dogs
to be able to detect dozens of different scents
based on recent intelligence.
Polasek: Unfortunately, we're unable to specifically
speak to the quantities of explosives
that these dogs are trained to find,
but we want them to be super good
at specific explosives based on the threat.
Pitre: Good puppy, good puppy.
I like it, puppy.
Narrator: After six to eight weeks
of working with the trainers,
the dogs are introduced to their future handlers,
whom they'll finish the program with.
Handlers in training come from across the country
and must meet certain criteria
in order to be accepted into the program.
I'll tell you, it's very competitive to get into canine
because there's a lot of responsibility.
Jessica Montgomery: Seeing our dogs at our airport,
what they were capable of doing, I was in awe.
And so I started researching up on them
and found out that's definitely what I wanted to partake
as my next step in my career.
Narrator: Handlers get paired with a dog
three to four weeks into their training.
Polasek: We try to get to know our students in and out.
And we also know our dogs and what their abilities are.
They have to be able to rely on each other.
If you don't have a good pairing
between the dog and the handler,
it's just not going to work.
Montgomery: This is Ubul.
He is a 2-year-old German shepherd.
He's a rambunctious man,
but he's a cool partner to work with.
Narrator: Jessica and Ubul are part of the TSA's
16-week passenger-screening course,
which is five weeks longer
than the traditional explosives detection course.
Robert Newsome: Remember to feather.
Walk straight, don't let him walk you at a angle.
Walk straight. Hold your ground, hold your ground.
Walk straight. Very good.
Narrator: Working in a simulated airport terminal
complete with actors posing as bystanders,
canine teams practice screening passengers
for explosive odors that have been placed
on certain role-players.
Basically, we have the personnel come through a line.
We call it cutting wakes.
So the dog will cut past the person left and right
and hopefully pick up whatever the odor
that they're trained on.
All right, about to bring the odor in.
Once they encounter the odor they're trained on,
the handler will turn around and follow the dog
and reward the dog for good behavior.
Montgomery: That's a good boy! Good boy!
Newsome: Right, cheer him up, praise him up.
Doing well in training, I look for two things.
I look for the drive of the dog.
Is the dog able to commit to follow the person
that has whatever it is trying to detect?
And then I watch the handler's hands.
Is the handler holding the dog back,
or is the handler releasing the leash
to allow the dog to proceed?
You control this.
If he's standing out here and you're not ready,
"Hold my line, please."
Flip him back around,
get him how you want him.
"Release line." And then do your thing.
The most common mistake is the leash control.
You're walking your household dog on a leash,
you let the dog be a dog, do whatever you want.
But when you're doing this type of training
with the dog on a leash,
it's a balance of when to have control
and when not to have control.
Nice. Nice work, nice work. Good hit.
They did outstanding. Again, this is on day 13.
They've known these two dogs for 13 days,
and to be able to allow the dog
and read that behavior is very good.
Narrator: Handlers and their dogs graduate
and are deployed as a team,
so their ability to work together is crucial.
Montgomery: It's definitely a lot of fun seeing it click
for the dog and watch them learn along with you, or with me.
So it's been a real cool experience.
Good man, Ubul!
Narrator: The dogs receive 24 to 32 weeks of training,
and roughly 90% of all canine teams
graduate from the course.
Once they do, they'll be deployed
to one of the many mass-transit sites
across the United States.
Stoerrle: Ready to go to work?
Narrator: Like Gary Stoerrle and Bak.
Narrator: The team graduated
from the TSA Canine Training Center in 2016
and have been working
at the Philadelphia International Airport ever since.
Stoerrle: Bak is a 9-year-old
flat-coated retriever shepherd mix.
He's a goofball. He's a character.
He definitely has a lot to say to everybody.
He loves people. He loves the job.
He wakes up every morning ready to go.
He has found ammunition.
He has found a few things,
that's really as far as I can go.
Ready?
Go seek.
Good.
When we're working together,
I'm focusing on making sure
he is productively sniffing the wake of passengers.
So as they're going by, the odor coming off of passengers,
the odor plume is coming behind
and dropping down to the ground.
So I'm just watching him, watching his nose and his head,
looking for subtle changes that might indicate
that he's picking up on something.
Narrator: The team also performs
daily training exercises.
Stoerrle: Good boy, go find it!
Where is it?
Huh? Where is it?
So, today we had a decoy.
So we put a training aid on the decoy,
sent the decoy in with passengers, dog pinpoints it.
Good boy!
That's a buddy!
Thank you, Maya.
Good job! What you got, huh? What you got?
Bak's change in behavior can range depending on the day,
but when he starts spinning around in a circle
when we're working, he's on to something,
and he wants to go find it.
To the dog, it's all the same.
It's a giant game to the dog.
As long as they think they're going to get their reward,
they'll go anywhere you tell them to go.
Bak's part of my family.
He comes home. He's with me 24 hours a day.
Even when we go on vacation and he's in the kennel,
I'm calling the kennel to make sure he's OK.
Stay.
Up.
Good job.
Yes, good boy.
Bak's toy is squeaky tennis ball.
He will go nuts for it.
He probably heard me squeak it from all the way up here.