| Airport security has never been as important as it has in the last five years. Since congress enacted the Airport Security Federalization Act in 2001 a slew of new legislation and procedures have been adopted with the single view of a making flight safe from potential terrorism. One of the provisions of that act was to provide all airport security screening staff federal employees with the training necessary to do their jobs. It also created a Federal Transportation Security Administration under the department of Transport with overall authority for the security of commercial passengers on land, sea and air. Under this new law all airport security screening personnel must be American citizens. What this means for travelers is that from at least 31 December 2002 all checked baggage must be screened for explosives as well as X-Rayed, and boarded passengers matched to checked luggage. What’s more the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening system was implemented to cross reference travelers with known suspects and felons.
Air marshals made a welcome reintroduction to flights, cockpit doors were reinforced, video cameras monitored the cabin from the cockpit, and 911 capable phones had to be available to passengers. In addition the Act provided for the future use of voice stress technology to identify potential threats on the terminals side, before that person boards the plane. All sensible measures in the security mix and indeed somewhat surprising many of them weren’t already in place. However, if history is any guide, safety features are usually developed after events have proven them necessary. As a result airports and airlines have been scrambling since 2001 to catch up with new technologies and legislation that are also effective and won’t create bottlenecks.
Inevitably anti-terrorism procedures often have an ad-hoc, reactive aspect to them that is inescapable. Consider the steps taken after the recent British thwarted terror plots of summer 2006. Hand luggage was banned from the air cabin, no liquids allowed on flight (to the chagrin of nursing mothers!) and all shoes inspected at the gate security check. Panicky and counter-productive was the unavoidable accusation, only time will tell how effective they will be and the strict prohibition on hand luggage has since been somewhat relaxed. Certainly it has inspired our local Transport Administration to follow suit and ban the presence of liquids in carry-on baggage; with, thankfully the exception of baby formula, milk and prescription medicine. In purely security terms there is something to be said for improvised initiatives such as these, for one thing they make planning an attack that little bit harder, and the downside is the disruption, which inexorably translates into dollar and cents.
The dilemma is this: you cannot future-proof your security measures, if there is a protocol it can be circumvented, if there is a new technology there will be eventually a counter-measure. Look at it this way; in many ways 9/11 was a one-off opportunity the bad guys ruthlessly exploited, and to plan to prevent another 9/11 is to risk missing the security flaws in the measure you implement doing so. What can be done? Well, think of it as an arms race where rolling out new detection technology is essential before someone finds a way of working round it. Consider metal detectors. Current models are fully computerized and can set sensitivity, discrimination, track speed, threshold volume, notch filters and other parameters. These deeper seeking metal detectors can also hold data in memory and potentially match patterns for better discrimination. Where previously height detection was a novelty it is now industry standard and with a raft of new engineering coming down the line, like beat balance and coil coupled operation metal detectors will keep their pre-eminent place in the security of our airports and other public buildings.
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METAL DETECTORS TYPES
