Having just flown back to the UK from a week spent working in the Israeli sunshine, I was glad to have woken up on Sunday morning to no sign of the predicted snowfall in my garden.
Switching on the TV, though, proved many people in the UK were not as lucky as me. It was the usual parade of journalists standing by roadsides up and down the country describing the chaos. For me, it was the commentary from the major airports that I found most interesting.
At present, I’m putting the finishing touches to our exhibition stand for the ATC Global event that takes place in Amsterdam next month. A perennial theme of this annual gathering for practitioners in the air traffic control industry is how to keep airport operations safe, secure and running smoothly.
An airport like Heathrow operates very much like a Formula 1 car: it’s finely tuned and runs at peak performance, but should something happen to knock matters out of kilter the situation can escalate quickly… and the knock-on effect is considerable.
Heathrow was widely criticised for its ‘snow plan’ and decision to cancel around half of its flights before a single flake of snow had fallen.
However, the scenes that we witnessed last year have been largely avoided and made it easier for security and surveillance teams to keep airports safe and secure in testing times.
Huge operational headache
For passengers that needed to travel at the weekend it would have been little consolation that airports had clearly learned many lessons from last winter.
Most notably those at one particular airport which experienced a huge operational headache when members of the security team were unable to make their shift, resulting in queues in excess of three hours for passengers to pass through security checks. As a result many passengers missed their flights.
The challenge airport security teams face in keeping their facilities safe and secure 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year is absolutely huge. Throw adverse weather in to the mix and it becomes even tougher to sustain the high standards demanded.
In addition to a typical shift the Control Room and its dedicated security personnel need to cope with the potential of reduced visibility from external cameras, snow fall causing false alarms from sensors, damage to surveillance equipment, increased risk of vehicle incidents, dealing with physical and verbal assaults between irate passengers and airline staff, injury from people slipping, congestion at the terminals and on roads, irregular passenger movement patterns, last-minute changes to flight schedules and gates… The list could go on and on.
Physical Security Information Management
In previous blogs I’ve talked in some depth about situation management (or Physical Security Information Management).
Today, many airport security managers around the world have invested in and are using this technology to analyse and learn from past incidents. They’re constantly refining, adapting and improving planned responses and their ability to execute them more effectively.
Also, the capability of security systems to cope with extreme weather has improved markedly in recent years. For example, we were recently involved in deploying video content analytics 13,000 feet up the Himalayan mountains. You really cannot get much more extreme than that!
So, while some will choose to downplay the performance of our airports this week, I will be flying their flag and particularly the efforts of the security teams (well those that made their shifts).
Their contribution not only maintains airports as safe and secure environments for everyone who uses them, but also helps to make them run like a Formula 1 car for the other 360 days of the year.
Jamie Wilson is security marketing manager (EMEA) at NICE Systems
