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Ideal airport security

Honeywell has been actively involved with security solutions in airports around the world for quite some time. Lynne Larsen spoke to Francois Rossouw, operations manager IS at Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions, South Africa, about the security threats at airports, and the ideal solutions.

Francois Rossouw

An airport is a business at the end of the day, and one of the main issues it has is getting passengers though the airport as efficiently as possible. So the security system deployed at an airport should try and enhance that. Of course, there are also many sensitive areas in an airport. Being a public place there is a huge amount of people-traffic going through the airport who would need to be kept out of certain high-security areas. So, ideally, airport security is a combination of efficiency – passenger efficiencies through the airport as well as having the high-risk areas protected.

Then there is always the issue of baggage handling, which has often raised the concerns of passengers. Tracking of baggage via CCTV has proved helpful for the peace of mind of the airport and also for the perception it gives the public – that their baggage is safe and well looked after.

Finally, ensuring that cargo is safely transported, stored, warehoused and so forth is another security concern for airports. Again the right access levels and having the right security from a CCTV point of view to monitor incidents is important.

Securing people

For the safety and security of passengers and for crowd control CCTV plays a vital role. And also for monitoring unattended baggage as today’s intelligent CCTV systems can pick up things like that, as well as how crowds react and move, and raise alerts to suspicious-looking actions. CCTV plays a big role in passenger management and public management in airports. Access control must obviously also be in place at entrances and to keep the public out of certain areas, basically it is more a control mechanism than anything else, but nonetheless an important part of the security solution – at the entrance to the airport as well as to restricted areas like the runway areas.

Access control is more than just monitoring and perhaps limiting access, it involves the whole process of looking at how the access control functions as well as to prevent unauthorised access to restricted areas. It is a process that needs to be followed in the initial design of access control systems. It is not just putting in the access control system, the solution provider needs to understand the business requirements for that point in order to understand how staff, passengers and public move through the airport in order to provide the correct access control at the right points – firstly, from a security point of view but also not to inconvenience passengers and allow airport staff to efficiently manage passengers and the day-to-day operations of the airport. It is a joint approach between the airport and whoever does the design and implementation installation of an airport system.

Typically, the consultant or installer would speak to the operations managers of the airport to understand their critical areas in operations and then include security into that in order to meet and satisfy the security as well as the operational requirements in a system that will support their business drives but still take care of their security.

Once the CCTV cameras are in place, it is important that the right people – and right number of people – are employed to monitor the footage; it is no use putting up 50 screens and employing two operators. The system needs to cater for productive operators as well, to give the airport security people the right information at the right time and make it efficient and easy for them to look at incidents efficiently, get to incidents and managing those incidents. And the system should be focused on preventative rather than proactive measures.

Securing possessions

Baggage efficiency is also part of the smooth running of an airport. It needs to flow from the time it is booked in until the time it is loaded onto the aircraft. The security system must not affect that process and result in passengers waiting for baggage either on the plane or at the carousel. Baggage needs to be tracked and also secured; making sure it is not tampered with. Ideally, the flow of baggage should be under surveillance, which would act as a deterrent but also provide information for reactive measures should baggage be seen to have been tampered with, in which case an alert can be raised. Once again, access control is important to provide only the right people access to the baggage areas.

Because so many different people need to get to the aircraft, strict access control to the runway and apron areas at airports is important. It is not practical to cover every inch of the outside of an airport with CCTV cameras, but monitoring gates and perimeter fencing is a solution, which works really well when combined with a biometric solution whereby an employee swipes an access card and the identity is cross-checked against fingerprint verification or the photograph on the card.

Towards 2010

I think the main thing the South African airports may struggle with is getting people through the airport as fast and as efficiently as possible because I do not think South Africa will have seen the amount of people going through an airport like OR Tambo International, the scale of people going through it like we will see during 2010.

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