British ‘passenger friendly airport’ proposal unrealistic

By Prof. Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

British Secretary of State for Transport Philip Hammond proposal to resolve the security issue at UK airports by introducing a “passenger friendly” approach should raise a lot of eyebrows.

The keystone of this idea is to move away from the current highly prescriptive one-size-fits-all approach to one that will provide greater flexibility in the way they screen passengers.

Source: Department for Transport

Apparently, in reaction to a US survey showing that passengers are keeping away from airports due to the “non-friendly” security treatment they receive and the resulting cost to airports and airlines, the British have come out with the right buzz words. All to bring back and increase the number of customers – and with it airport and airline revenue!

But how do we make airports “passenger friendly?” Research evidence has found that nearly a quarter of security employees do not follow the prescribed rules and regulations and a similar number even initiate and break the rules when necessary.

Thus, despite the universal, monochromatic, security procedures instituted by governments or local agencies – the same ones that are reactive and see all passengers as potential terrorists – are already being modified by the security employees themselves. This tells us not only about the effectiveness of the security protocols and procedures but also how security employees are being underestimated. Their rule bending is actually innovative behavior that attempts to deal with passenger dissatisfaction and make security procedures more effective.

It appears that the rigid rules and procedures have become so fossilized within the airport organizational administration and reinforced by legalistic protocols issued periodically that workers simply do not allow local or internal adaptive changes to take place.

If this is the case, is it possible to move to a more flexible system of passenger security screening?

Without the active participation of security managers and evidence-based policy changes on the part of the public agencies overseeing the running of airports and security, substantive changes will not take place. Simply piling on more rules and regulations, while ignoring the complex social dynamics of security employee decision making, will only produce another virtual “ passenger friendly ” airport.

* The writer is the initiator and coordinator of BEMOSA (Behavioral Modeling of Security in Airports).

Boarding pass breach emphasizes need to pay attention to human factor

By Prof. Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

A recent report concerning the arrest of a Nigerian man who slipped by airport security controls numerous times by using a series of fake boarding passes once again reveals the Achilles heel of airport security.

Airport authorities rely almost completely on technology and routine, but only marginally invest in employee initiative or innovative behavior. This typical pattern was uncovered in an ongoing EU study focusing on security employees and passenger behavior in major European airports conducted by BEMOSA (Behavioral Modeling of Security in Airports).


Analysing passenger behavior in airport terminal

But what we also discovered was that despite the emphasis on technology and following rules and procedures, many of the security employees provided a clear indication of a willingness to take the initiative when the situation called for it, even bending or breaking the rules when necessary.

Just the fact that so many did not trust the security technology was a back-handed indication they felt they were being under-utilized. A pilot study supported this interpretation dramatically as close to 90 percent of the sample of security employees felt that their managers were not paying attention to their suggestions on how to improve security.

Perhaps it is about time we started to utilize this evidence as a basis to rethink how to best invest in employees as an integral part of airport security, and to stop thinking about them as a necessary cog in maintaining the rules and procedures.

* The writer is the initiator and coordinator of BEMOSA.

IATA’s ‘Checkpoint of the Future’ likely to fail

By Prof. Aln (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

Source: IATA

The concept of “Checkpoint of the Future” proposed by the IATA as a means of streamlining passenger flow is based on two erroneous assumptions which have continually been supported by airport planners and security experts.

The first is the assumption that passengers are “objects” that can be manipulated by the tenets of engineering and production processing and the second is that technology can replace humans in security decision-making situations.

Both of these assumptions have been proven wrong based on preliminary results obtained by researchers participating in BEMOSA (Behavior Modeling for Security in Airports), an EU-funded project. For one, an analysis of a broad sample of passengers revealed clear differences between men and women, those with children and those without in terms of how they perceived airport security and potential behaviors in emergency or crisis situations.

Treating passengers as an undifferentiated mass totally overlooks differences in their behavior throughout their airport “experience,” including security checks and confidence and trust in the airport management (via security employees) to protect them.

Even more startling was the large proportion of security employees who had little or no trust in security technologies, even though they themselves utilized them! Combining this fact with a similar inclination to bend or even break the rules if the situation called for it places a very large question mark over the capabilities of technology as the last word in security when there appears to be a large margin of “judgment calls” being made by security employees.

What these BEMOSA results all point to is that while engineering and technology are part of airport security systems, without taking into account the real behaviors of passengers and employees, attempts at making the airport a friendly and inviting place will likely fail.

* The writer is the initiator and coordinator of BEMOSA.

The Adaptive Airport Employee - what happens when the rules don't cover the security situation!

By Prof. Aln (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

BEMOSA analysis of a field survey of European airports that entailed interviewing a broad range of airport employees has shown that some employees are more adaptive in dealing with unusual threatening situation than others. 

This is in sharp contrast to the security framework of rules and procedures that were developed to guide their actions during routine and threatening security situations. The fact that a large proportion of the total sample of respondents (75%) had never encountered a "real" security threat or believed that most threats were "false alarms" (65%) may have played a role in affecting such adaptive behaviors. Typical of responses were that such employees would bend the rules if the situation calls for it (35%), even act against orders (20%) or break protocol to get the job done (40%).

After a careful analysis of the responses it became apparent that three key features of employees' characteristics were significant in being able to adapt to "new" or "unusual" situations not covered by the numerous rules and protocols in place: these were related to a specific set of personal, organizational and social network traits. 

Of even more interest is that the proportion of adaptive employees significantly varied by airport suggesting that the organizational and/or cultural climate of each has an impact on its employee's ability to adapt to non-routine and unusual security threats. Further, given the ever changing threats and the "catching up" through reactive regulations, following "old" rules may not be the best strategy to make airport security more effective; making it imperative to enhance training so as to reward adaptive behaviors as a proactive means of dealing with the unexpected.

* The writer is the initiator and coordinator of BEMOSA.   

BEMOSA to showcase findings at NDM 2011 in Orlando

Scientific Manager of BEMOSA Dr. Michele Mariani from the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia will lecture on "investigating security-related behavior and decision making in airports" at the NDM 2011 event in Orlando, Florida this week.

The presentation will take place as part of the 10th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) on Friday, June 3, 2011, in room Boca 5, as part of the "Socio-cognitive Factors in Naturalistic Settings” session.

The session will present the initial findings of BEMOSA’s (Behavior Modeling for Security in Airports), study of European airports. By studying airports throughout Europe, the EU co-funded BEMOSA project is collecting evidence of naturally occurring security-related social decision making.

The findings will form the basis for the development of an evidence-based dynamic and realistic simulation of airport decision-making and will help deliver evidence-based training modules.

NDN brings together world leaders in research seeking to understand and improve how people actually perform cognitively complex functions in demanding situations. The NDM community represents an interdisciplinary group of researchers united by their study of human performance in situations marked by time pressure, uncertainty, vague goals, high stakes, team and organizational constraints, changing conditions, and varying levels of experience.