Counter Terror Gazette

Known Shippers: how much do we really know about our cargo?

22 Dec 2010

Cargo security has traditionally been more about the bureaucratic process than actual physical inspection. Ensuring a valid paper trail is vital to safeguarding aviation and ensuring that air cargo can travel from A to B in as short a time as possible, but we also need to have an in-built mechanism to guarantee that air cargo security doesn’t just become a tick box exercise. With the recent discovery of two improvised explosive devices found on cargo planes, Norman E.L. Shanks and Viki Johnston review the global approaches to validating the integrity of cargo consignments. 

Historically, screening air cargo has been considered too large a problem to address successfully with most of the focus from manufacturers and the industry on bulk screening solutions, so that entire containers can be screened at one time. Unfortunately this has proved to be a difficult task and the industry and regulators have comforted themselves in the knowledge that air cargo was a less likely target than other parts of the aviation industry. At least that was the considered view until the recent discovery of the two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at courier hubs in East Midlands and Dubai.  A number of aviation security professionals have long held the view that it was only a matter of time before cargo would be targeted.  There has also been a tendency to believe that air cargo was not a favoured target by terrorists, though of course this is a false view; cargo has been used to send postal bombs in the past, yet the main difference was that the target was the recipient and not the aircraft itself. This has been very graphically demonstrated by the recent spate of Greek letter bombs sent to high profile figures such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, via the Chancellery mailroom. A factor that previously enabled the industry to take a degree of comfort was the unpredictability of the movement of air cargo within the system. However with virtually all of the major companies now providing the ability for customers to track the movements of shipments from point to point, that previous comfort of unpredictability has been eroded as all that is needed to predict where your package is likely to be is a small number of trial runs. MORE ONLINE