David Learmount/LONDON
Consider this scenario: Mr X arrives at the security checkpoint in an international airport. Only one of the four baggage scanners is in operation and the queue for it is long. His flight closes in 15min and there is a long walk to the departure gate.
He has already queued for check-in and passport control, and complains bitterly to a fellow passenger about the airport's decision to reduce costs by not manning all the scanners. Having passed through the metal detector arch, Mr X is brusquely frisked by one security guard, and another asks him to open his briefcase and explain the contents. Panicking about missing his flight, he remonstrates loudly with the officer, but this is ignored and the request is repeated in a long-suffering monotone.
The checks complete, he picks up his briefcase and suit bag and runs for the departure gate. Boarding the aircraft, the stewardess tells him he can bring only one piece of hand baggage on board. His suit bag must go in the hold. He protests, but is met with polite firmness. Arriving at his seat sweating, he needs a cigarette and a drink, but the flight is non-smoking. The captain's voice on the cabin address informs them that a checked passenger is missing and they will have to delay the flight while his baggage is offloaded. The flight misses its take-off slot and departs an hour and a half late.
By the time the meal trolley arrives at X's seat, the dish of his choice is no longer available. The bar trolley had run out of Campari when he had asked for an aperitif before dinner. The subsequent explosion of air rage directly involves four members of the cabin crew, two of whom are injured. X then throws food around the cabin, and the nearby passengers then suffer eight hours of torment during the oceanic crossing because the man, now handcuffed to his seat, indulges in frequent bursts of loud, offensive abuse.
Security Tensions
The detail in this sequence is fictional but represents real events. It highlights the tensions between the need for security, its high cost to the airport/airlines, and its effect on the airport's ability to process passengers efficiently and pleasantly. It also shows that that security procedures, designed to protect air transport from people who would do it harm, can change harmless travellers into disruptive passengers.
Pierre Jeanniot, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), sees two performance areas in which airlines must improve dramatically to avoid alienating future passengers. The first is safety. The other is passenger processing at increasingly overcrowded airports. IATA strongly believes that all security is the responsibility of the state, not of airports or airlines, but it recognises that few states will ever assume this responsibility except for situations directly related to national security.
The International Federation of Airline Pilots' Associations (IFALPA) is negotiating with airlines and authorities to raise all security standards worldwide, on the grounds that where aircraft or passengers are at risk, so are the pilots, who are ultimately charged with protecting the safety of the aircraft and all on board. IFALPA says of disruptive passengers: "This problem, while not constituting the type of dire threat to life posed by a bomb or a hijacker, still poses demonstrably real hazards to the safety of passengers, crews and, ultimately, the flight.
"With the two-pilot cockpit in widespread and growing use today, sending a pilot into a passenger cabin to help resolve a dispute could seriously diminish the safety of a flight." Disruptive passengers, not only hijackers, have forced their way into cockpits. One small improvement that IFALPA suggests is for cockpit doors to open outward (toward the passenger cabin), to make forcing more difficult. There are many considerations, however, ranging from the location of fire axes to the fact that inflight meal cutlery could be used as weaponry.
Unlawful Interference
In IFALPA's view, the International Civil Aviation Organisation's (ICAO) standards and recommended practices for the world's air transport industry need updating in terms of the methods and procedures for handling aircraft which have been hijacked and dealing with disruptive passengers.
For example, the document, known as Annex 17, suggests that only actual violence on an aircraft is outlawed as "acts of unlawful interference". IFALPA wants Annex 17 to take a broader view and outlaw activity such as "communication of threats, hoaxes or false information causing interference with the safe, orderly or efficient operation of an aircraft [and] disobedience of lawful commands or instructions."
Indeed, the Federation has annotated the entire, and very extensive, Annex with recommendations. For example, some passengers who buy duty-free alcoholic drinks at departure airports and drink them on board the aircraft when the cabin crew have refused to serve them alcohol. IFALPA wants ICAO to recommend that duty-free alcohol purchases by passengers may be made only at destination airports.
IFALPA believes that more thought needs to be given to the issue of disruptive passengers, and indeed to passenger behaviour in general, with the advent of extended range Boeing 777s, Airbus A340s, and the massive new A3XX. These aircraft will be capable of flying for 20h or more, non-stop, which takes travelling into a different league. Although long-range aircraft can already fly 16h, this is the exception, but the economy cabins of today's aircraft have not yet changed - apart from having more sophisticated inflight entertainment systems - in their basic design from the days when a long flight was 8 or 10h.
What, asks IFALPA, will be the psychological effects on passengers of being confined in the vicinity of, say, squawking children, or of not being able to smoke for 20h? And how could serious disruptive passengers be restrained, and where could they be accommodated to separate them from other passengers for the rest of a very long flight?
Where the USA is increasingly putting its faith in high technology to aid airport security checks (see P36), the rest of the world tends to depend more on procedures and multi-layered checks, in which technology plays a part. For many years the basic building block of security, where hold baggage is concerned, has been "baggage reconciliation", or the requirement that no baggage may be carried without the owner being on the same aircraft. This works on the assumption that most terrorist agents do not intend to travel in the same aircraft as their bomb, and in the case of the sabotaged Pan American 747 at Lockerbie in 1989 and the similar Air India 747 disaster over the Atlantic in 1985, that was true.
Positive Identification
In both cases the fatal bags had been checked in but the owners were not on the aircraft. One essential part of the system is that, on boarding, the airline not only ensures that all passengers have a boarding card, but positively identifies everyone holding a boarding card to ensure that people have not exchanged cards. Not all airlines carry out this check scrupulously.
In practice, baggage reconciliation means that, if a checked-in passenger does not turn up for boarding, the flight must identify and unload his/her baggage before leaving. This means delay, and a delay at a slot-limited airport can be serious. It is difficult to say how often a captain on a flight which is not a natural target for terrorists may be tempted to call for push-back anyway, but airport employees say it happens. The USA is ambivalent, requiring baggage reconciliation for its international flights but not domestic ones. It was recommended for domestic flights by the Gore Commission, but the Air Transport Association of America lobbied its way out of it.
In many countries, security in the airport terminals may seem to be in place, but airports generally are not secure. IFALPA quotes the example of Lagos, Nigeria, where the perimeter is so insecure that criminals find access easy, and aircraft baggage has even been stolen from cargo holds while the aircraft is taxiing. Such access to taxiing aircraft poses a security risk, let alone the loss of baggage to thieves, and IFALPA wants Annex 17 to require states to ensure that it is impossible. The identification of authorised personnel on all airport ramps and manoeuvring areas, standard procedure now in developed nations, is also a demand, as is the careful selection of all those allowed into ramp jobs. Their background and character must be checked before being cleared for airside jobs, insists IFALPA.
Technology may help in making airports and flights secure, but the system still depends upon the people who make up the total industry security system. Without their personal vigilance, the technology is rendered useless.
Source: Flight International
