Covid has meant staff losses at airports and by airlines. It will take time, when normal aviation is resumed – maybe in the summer, maybe in 2022 – to return to pre-covid security standards, with routine close contact with masses of passengers as they are processed through check-points to airside.
Meanwhile, covid-safety is not consistent across aviation, even at airports in the same country. Crews can fly from one country to another without tests, or quarantine on arrival, even without wearing masks. The pre-pandemic threats to safe and secure aviation, meanwhile, don’t go away. Besides, airports were under massive financial pressure for years before the pandemic, and won’t spend on esoteric technologies for security monitoring, like gait analysis, as Arup consultant Geoff Moore told the 93rd OSPAs thought leadership webinar, yesterday afternoon.
About the panel
Geoff Moore is an Arup security consultant, based in Hong Kong; Andy Kynoch is MD of ICTS UK and Ireland, the international aviation security contractor; and Ali Alharthy is a former Omani army colonel, now Team Lead Center of Excellence for Security and Crisis Management at the oil and gas firm OQ.
Given that close contact with people brings the risk of covid infection, and the sheer number of contacts at an airport – at security check-in, besides in duty-free retail – the webinar made plain that not only will there have to be much work to make terminals and aircraft covid-free, and to process any ‘health passports’ to prove tests for covid or vaccination, but passengers and airport and airline staff will have to overcome fear of infection. For aviation to return to pre-covid levels will require not only the physical bringing back of aircraft and dismantled infrastructure, but consumer confidence.
The webinar aired the two security management (and safety) cultures, that can apply also to other industries: compliance-based, which can be heavy-handed, and mean that an airport has more security than is necessary – and which comes at a cost; or outcomes-focused, as brought in, in recent years, by the UK regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
Also aired was the work to bring in technology to allow social distancing while still carrying out security checks, whether facial recognition (masks only add to the difficulty of making an absolute certainty of identification; rather, facial recognition engines only give a ‘level of confidence’, in percentage terms, of an ID). What came across in the webinar was the sheer amount of work by human staff, to keep aircraft and airport terminals covid-free, such as searching every pocket in a jet’s seats after each flight. Andy Kynoch confirmed that ‘a huge amount of work has gone on’, and gave international examples of his company working with airlines and airports.
More in the April 2021 print edition of Professional Security magazine.
The next webinar is this afternoon; on corporate security directors. Next week’s cover security consultancy; and ‘modern slavery’. The March 30 webinar on ‘agile security’ is due to be the 100th since Prof Martin Gill of Perpetuity Research began them twice weekly, during the first pandemic lockdown. Webinars are free to attend; and you can listen to past ones. Visit theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/.
