Counter Terror Gazette

A Personal View Expressed by Capt. Nico Voorbach

13 Jun 2010

The closing of European airspace on Thursday 15^th April 2010, due to a volcanic ash cloud, showed once more that the decisions to operate are no longer left to pilots but are directed by political sensitivities. Aviation regulatory authorities took away the possibility for pilots and airlines to make decisions regarding safety, disregarding the fact that they are prepared and trained to handle such situations. We often say that the air transport industry is the most regulated deregulated field; this is not only true from a safety and commercial point of view but also from a security one.

Attacks and attempted attacks such as Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, 9/11, Richard Reid (the ‘Shoe Bomber’), the liquid plot in the UK and NW 253 on Christmas Day 2009, have been the source of new regulations based on emergency responses.  Every incident has demonstrated a number of failures in the security chain that led to the success of a terrorist attack.  Unfortunately, emergency responses solely focus on the last failure in the chain which is very often the least important one. Consequently, the bunch of new regulations aimed at improving air transport security also focus on a particular aspect of the terrorist attack. Such an approach is not efficient in practice as it obliges airports and airlines to acquire new security equipment, increasing the financial burden on the air transport industry and making it less competitive. From a political point of view, very few voices are heard addressing the real problems such as the lack of effective communication between national intelligence agencies.

All this new legislation may be justified but it is mostly designed in such a way that security measures are easily inspected or audited. Yet, they are often too rigid and not adapted to operational reality.  This takes away the possibility for specialists to assess the effectiveness of the measures.

As discussed several times in this journal, these new measures are usually just added to the old ones. Instead of looking at the whole security chain and trying to rethink it in a most integrated and efficient way, new layers are just added on top of the others, reducing the overall efficiency of the security system. (More online).