Airport gripes

The contrast does seem odd. I was on my way to a conference of the world’s top airline security executives. But first there was the obstacle course via humiliation and pandemonium at Stansted, possibly the world’s worst airport. I was reminded of what one complaints website said, talking of “Biblical scenes that were Stansted’s queues” and saying: “The armed police must be there to stop us lynching airport staff.”
When I arrived at Charleroi I sped quickly into Brussels, walked in to the town’s most luxurious hotel, the Conrad, walked up the registration desk, hadn’t pre registered but flashed my presscard, was greeted with a smile and the words “We will have your badge ready in a minute. P lease go ahead right in”. And was inside a room full of the world’s top security experts from airlines, airports and aviation organisations within thirty seconds..
I had a daypack with me and so, concludingly, it is much easier to blow up a conclave of top air executives (perhaps from the Passengers’ Liberation front) than it is to blow up a planeful of lowly leisure travellers on a discount flight.
I found top officials hugely unhappy, with the situation. The first official who spoke said – and this was after Glasgow: “There’s too much security in airports these days, more than passengers stand for. They would willingly take extra risks for less inconvenience but are not consulted.” A panellist explained why: “Every time there is a new outrage politicians have to be seen to do something. So they impose new security restrictions on airports and passengers. They take the credit, but don’t pay the price: 25-40% of airport costs are now security. Ultimately it is the passengers who pay through their ticket prices, or putting up with the departure lounges turned into shopping malls: if airports were not able to cross subsidise from retail profits, ticket prices would be much higher.”
Over lunch, one official, Pekka Salo, deputy head of security at Finnair, said; “Security at airports ought to become less of an issue now that you just blow people up with a carbomb or on the metro. But flying is an iconic fear among passengers, and airports are easy to pick on. You don’t see governments going to the association of nightclub owners and saying: what security measures have you implemented outside your nightclub?”
Salo also complained about the “placebo security” – meaning pseudo security measures imposed at haste after some outrage that do very little to improve real security and whose sole beneficial effect, if it even manages that, is to reassure passengers. “Take the ban on nail clippers and nail files. That’s stupid. Because airside you can easily get hold of eating knives in one of the many airside restaurants that are more dangerous than that. Or what if someone can do karate….” His real fears concerned “airport workers lending terrorists their access cards.”
The ban on liquids came in for some criticism. Dr Michael Kerkloh, the CEO of Munich airport, summarised the regulations that see thousands of litres of duty free liquid being poured out daily at his and other European airports in purchases belonging to transit passengers coming from outsider the EU and going to an onward destination within Europe: “Bullshit.” In the sardonic words of another safety official: “It’s only because airports want to sell passengers their whisky twice.” Bernard Liim, director of international relations and security at the ministry of transport in Singapore, said that some airports in Asia even confiscated duty frees on final arrival, “when you have arrived, and you will travelling home by car, final destination, and are no danger to other passengers.” Shaking his head, he said: “There is a lack of harmonisation on these issues.”
The problem is set to get worse unless better solutions are found and a proper debate is carried out, it was agreed. Even Gunther Maschnigg, the head of safety at IATA, which has to be circumspect and conservative, said: “There is much better security but also much, much more frustration, since 9-11. There have been many stopgap measures. Air travel is growing, in some countries 10-20 percent annually. By 2020 there will be 80 percent more air travel globally. The current system of security cannot adapt.”
To me, it seems that the debate has to start by separating out security that doesn’t work from real security. Then – the trade-off between real security and inconvenience has to be measured, a question for politicians, the public and experts.
Apart from the nailfile ban, placebo measures would surely include uniformed and armed police at airports. According to an Israeli security expert these only serve to reassure the public – and provide scouring terrorists for the first likely targets. Much better would be undercover armed guards. Another placebo measure is arguably the US no-fly list, whose reassuring-sounding 140,000 names to keep the homeland safe include many superfluities, deficiencies and anomalies: the list includes the 9/11 hijackers and Saddam Hussein, and several international statesmen with whom the US has diplomatic relations, including Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia. US journalists looking into this story were told “The CIA and various government agencies just took all their names on their computers and dumped them on to this list.”
Some genuine terrorists with common names, such as Robert Johnson, a 62-year-old black man convicted of plotting to bomb a movie theatre in Toronto, since deported to Trinidad. cause their innocent namesakes boarding a plane any amount of trouble. CBS’s Sixty Minutes recently interviewed a dozen Robert Johnsons, innocent all-Americans: businessmen, a politicians, soldiers, a football coach, all of whom had enormous troubles get on flights, sometimes interrogated for hours after the check-in agents who are obliged to call the alert if just a name similar or identical to one on the no-fly list flags up. The system is as crude as that. Sometimes they are even strip searched. A spokeswoman for the US Terrorist Screening Center just said that society and anyone named Robert Johnson has to pay for security.
The problem is – many real terrorists are not even on the list: for instance the original eleven British suspects recently charged with plotting to blow up ten commercial airliners with liquid explosives, even though they had reportedly been under surveillance for more than a year. Nevertheless, the list continues to monitor “terrorists” at every check-in because it gives American public opinion – legislatprs ad public - the reassurance of security.
But there are effective further security measures that can indeed be put in place. At the conference, Ramesh Anon, an Israeli security expert, talked tough. “We need to stay one step ahead of the terrorists, who will always find our weakest point. We have to have a global standardisation or terrorists will find the softest target.” He suggested more prior screening of travellers – background checks after ticket purchase – and more armed undercover air marshals on every flight. Other Israeli experts have recommended security booths on the single approach roads to the airport, accompanied by speed bumps, as at Tel Aviv airport, which would have stopped the Glasgow airport incident. .
But Tel Aviv airport has a fraction of the passengers (and car traffic) of Heathrow and Chicago, and is the rest of the world able or willing to take the admittedly successful security measures Israel imposes on airline traffic and employ it as the global solution to the growing worldwide air travel industry ? Travelling back, I caught the Eurostar.