Dispatches: Checking-in To Airport Chaos
Andrew Gilligan investigates the priorities and business tactics of the airports industry, asking how secure our airports are and who will be the winners and losers from airport expansion?
Explosives expert Sidney Alford highlights how ill-thought out and arbitrary the security rules regarding the carrying liquids is by creating an explosive that could be carried on in bottles of no more than 100ml and mixed on board and assuming there were co-conspirators on board an even greater amount could be accumulated. Alford doesn’t explain what exactly the liquids he was using are but does say that they are not particularly tightly controlled substances and can be sourced from several disparate industries in which their use is commonplace. so an amateur such as a terrorist could with a little research carry out exactly the same process.
Other experts such as Norman shanks BAA head of security 1991-1996 says that the industry always reacts to the last known threat.
Philip Baum Editor of Aviation Security International says it is all just security theatre and that he cannot cite a single example of when a bomb has been detected by the x-ray machines alone. He has carried out tests for governments and the results are very worrying one test involving a woman carrying bomb parts through 24 different airports every single one failed to detect a single component that she carried. Other results show that operators succeeded only 73% of the time to detect guns or knives.
Behaviour pattern recognition where staff are trained to spot suspicious behaviour was deemed not to be testable by the department of Transport and so the programme wasn’t implemented. They are far keener on technological answers!
I’m not sure why BAA don’t implement such procedures anyway. Where does responsibility lie? What role do they and the DoT play?
BAA also didn’t respond quickly enough to deal with the new security procedures and the result was huge queues at their airports whereas other airports owned for example by local government returned to normality pretty soon after the security scare.
Airlines are not happy with the way that BAA measures queues and would appear to be undercounting them and it is in their interest to lie as they are required to refund landing fees if queues are over a certain point. Independent surveys find their airports to be far less satisfactory than BAAs own surveys.
Almost seems designed to create long waiting times in BAAs airport shopping areas to maximise their retail revenues.
Expansion plans the government seems to have been influenced by BAA to allow the Heathrow third runway to be built ironically the CAA indicates there might not be sufficient airspace to accommodate the scale of predicted traffic growth.
