Safety briefing – the missing element
On 28/01/2010, in Battle stations, by steve
This blog is about air traffic management. But, by the nature of our business, we tend to travel more than the average citizen and the pilots among us spend half their life strapped to the aircraft that carry us around. So it is appropriate to say something for once as a passenger rather than the ATM expert I often claim to be.
I am one of those passengers who actually follows the safety briefing, checks the location of the emergency exits and who has actually studied the operation of the damn things. I would hate having to read the opening instructions with smoke filling the cabin… I never take off my shoes until we are at cruising level. And yes, I do check that my life vest is under my seat and yes, I did find an empty container once and complained before we were airborne.
Recently however I started missing something from the safety briefing. If you look at the statistics, the likelihood of needing my life vest is distinctly lower than the need to know what I should do in case the chap or gal sitting next to me turns out to have explosives in his or her pants and decides to use it too.
Click here to read the full article
Same time, same place, same level…15
On 09/11/2009, in Same time, same place..., by steve
Security and its guardians – Part 2
A phone call is enough…
Some people must have realized years ago just how easily the fear of god can be put into an airport by the simple impediment of a telephone call. If you were a safety official, what would you do if someone were to call at three in the morning, saying that Flight so and so will have a bomb on it? As likely as not, you would order a search of the aircraft, an extra careful check of passengers and luggage and, having turned up nothing suspicious, you would just sit back with your fingers crossed until the threatened plane arrived home safely. But you would never, not once, treat the telephone calls as not being for real. A lot of money and time is being wasted as a result of these telephone nuts, for less than a fraction of one percent of such telephone calls actually have a real threat behind them.
The telephone exchange at our airport had the disconcerting habit of regularly putting through callers to the control center’s extension whenever they could not make heads or tails of what the caller wanted. It was only natural that a call starting with the words “bomb” or “explosives” should end up ringing the supervisor’s line. Over the years most of us had the good fortune of talking to these nameless people cheerfully promising to blow up everything from aircraft to radar installations and from the catering kitchen to cars in the parking lot. While we chatted away, technicians desperately tried to trace the call, mostly ending up at a coin-box, long deserted by the time the police arrived.
Click here to read the full article
Terrorism – The Threat of Possible Attacks
On 04/09/2009, in Battle stations, by krisztian
The word “terrorism” is used in so many security related issues, that the true meaning of it has gone lost. If we look up terrorism in the dictionary the following is displayed:
Cambridge Dictionary of American English: “Violent action for political purpose”
The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) is one of the largest institutions fighting terrorism and describes terrorism as follows:
“The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
In the course of history the definition of terrorism has changed and things were added to it. As terrorism has been around since humans could walk it is not a new phenomenon. However it has become more public, more violent and focused on one certain perpetrator and one certain target.
Click here to read the full article
Teach for the future
On 24/07/2009, in Battle stations, by krisztian
In every conflict, be it in business, world clashes, local disputes or the upbringing of our children, we have always said: “learn from the past.”
Learning from the past
For this reason even military academies study ancient wars and tactics used therein to teach their future military leaders. In my domain, security, we do the same. We base our training on the past, scenarios that we have seen, that our instructors have lived are replayed and countered in order to make us ‘ready’ for what awaits us.
This sounds logical; we can only learn from our mistakes and praise ourselves over our victories. And to a certain level this is true. We do need to learn from our mistakes and use the past to shape the present. However, it is exactly in this last sentence that we make the biggest mistake.
As we live in the present and head towards the future, the enemy of the present lives in the future, a step ahead, always.
Look at 9/11. Aviation security has changed since those events, some might argue for the better, some might say for the worse, but is has changed. We have adapted our security measures to something that has happened in the past. We have made it virtually impossible for terrorist organizations to perpetrate such an act again. But the terrorists know this, and they will counter us using our biggest weakness, the fact that we live and train for the present.
Click here to read the full article
