33–50% of charter passengers carry prohibited items

Passengers of charter flights are responsible for the majority of extra costs arising from delays in airport security checks, according to scientific research conducted by Kirschenbaum Consulting.

The results indicate that while only 10–15% of scheduled passengers carried prohibited items, 33–50% of charter passengers did so. Moreover, while only 10% of regular flyers were re-examined by security employees, 33% of charter passengers needed another check.

“Security has become a key cost component in airports. Passenger behavior and its significance to airport profits should not be underestimated,” said Prof Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum, founder and CEO of Kirschenbaum Consulting. “We can clearly see that delays at the screening check point are directly related to the type of passenger involved. This requires paying more attention to the role that the human factor can have on security costs.”

The findings, that are based on a one-year in-depth study held at a regional European airport, also showed that, while charter passengers accounted for less than 50% of overall traffic, they were responsible for an additional 35% of the overall security costs.

Even though the majority of passengers pass through the security process very quickly, passengers who negotiate with the security personal consume close to 80% of the time spent passing through screening.

Kirschenbaum added that it could be conjectured that charter passengers were more likely to purchase holiday gifts and, given their lower sensitivity to security, more likely to be stopped for possessing prohibited items.

Airports estimate that it should take 20–30 seconds for a regular passenger to pass through the security screening process. The research showed, however, that it took those ignorant of the rules one to two minutes.

The study also showed that 85–90% of the prohibited items that delayed processing were liquids, with the remaining 10–15% consisting of knives, manicure files, paralytic sprays, cigarette lighters, imitation children’s toys and tools.

Reality sets the tone for new TSA airport security regulations

By Prof. Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

It has finally started. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has started to reduce the number of prohibited items that passengers need to deposit at security screening points before being allowed to board flights.

True, the items include such "dangerous" weapons as pocketknives, golf clubs and waffle ball style bats but it is a step in the right direction.

Source: The TSA Blog

The recent announcement is a decision that reflects a much more realistic assessment of airport security as the prohibited items regulators put on the "hit list" were reactions to a period when hijacking was the easiest and most effective way for terrorists to get attention. Now, with double pilot cabin doors, your trusty penknife or golf clubs will not do very much damage. Nevertheless, the other reality of airport security – namely bottom line profits is also at play here.  I would even argue that it played a critical role in bringing about this small step toward a more rational security policy.

In this case, two 'bottom-line' factors are at work in making these decisions and ensure airports remain financially viable: one magic bullet is increasing passenger "throughput". Logically, getting ever-increasing numbers of passengers in shorter times through the security screening process reduces security labor costs. It may also make passengers more amiable to purchase more goods and services (and of course cause less delayed flights).

How do you expedite this process? By simply keep reducing the number of prohibited items that need to be searched for, the time allocated in the queuing and searching process can be substantially reduced.

Let's look at this argument in terms of empirical evidence recently published from the BEMOSA project. This encompassed a detailed ethnographic "time-motion" study of an airport in addition to detailed interviews of security employees at another eight airports across Europe. It clearly showed that security screening is a social platform for negotiating between passenger and security employee when prohibited items show up.

This negotiating can move from outright refusal to give up an item to trying to convince the security employee to let the item pass. So much for rule compliance and the triumph of technology.

More interesting is that about 85-90 percent of the prohibited items that delayed processing were liquids; the remainder of confiscated items (10-15%) included knifes, manicure files, paralytic sprays, cigarette lighters, imitation children toys such as guns and knifes and in rare cases tools. And of course, those hidden pocketknives (more likely loose change or house keys) led to the necessity to have every third passenger retrace their steps and go through the metal detectors at least one more time.

A closer look at the passengers who were holding things up during the negotiating stages found them to be predominantly composed of "holiday makers" heading for a charter flight!

What this all suggests is that eliminating prohibited items by administrative fiat is too simple a solution to a very complex social and organizational problem. Dealing with passengers as people and not passive cogs in a mass production processing system requires looking at hard behavioral evidence and putting it within the social context of airport security. By looking at the human factor, security can be enhanced just as it has been done so through sophisticated technology.

----

 *Prof Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum, founder and CEO of Kirschenbaum Consulting.

Can a remote queue management system for airport security work in reality?

By Prof. Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

A recent report indicates that Warsaw Chopin is the first airport in the world to launch a remote queue management system aimed at controlling queue lengths and reducing the waiting time for security checks. The arrangement of the queuing configuration that directs the flow of passengers into the security screening path will automatically and seamlessly change according to queuing pressures.

Source: Warsaw Chopin site

No more unnecessary waiting in line, no more frustrated and angry passengers. Remote control at its finest. And, no need for human intervention or interference: no need for security personal to mix with passengers, argue with them, make judgments, be friendly or explain long delays. Information will now be relayed by sensors to software that will take this hazardous and annoying part of the security process and sanitize it. Heaven on earth!

But, if we look a little closer at the basic idea of continuing the “automation” of airport passenger processing by minimizing any contact or decisions by employees, we should also take into account the fact that passengers are not mindless, individual robots. Nor are they passive cogs in a mass processing factory.

Just picture the possibility of a family consisting of parents, children and grandparents on their way to enjoy a family vacation. They are waiting in line together, when all of a sudden the posts or guidance tapes change configuration and they find themselves split up. Great for optimizing the flow of passengers but terrible for the family members. And what can we expect regarding their probable behaviour?

Those posts and tapes will likely be ignored in favour of family togetherness. And others seeing this will also likely do the same. The technology does not accept that passengers are not cattle that blindly follow the chosen path.

So, we are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, we have sophisticated technology that should reduce queuing time, facilitate throughput and reduce costs and passenger dissatisfaction. On the other, we have passenger social behaviour which, to the airport designer, seems not only unreasonable but downright irrational. Complicate this situation with the fact that passengers are a very diverse population culturally, socially and economically. Some have experience in airport travel while others do not. Some arrive at airports as family units and others do not. Some are on charter flights and others on commercial scheduled flights. All these differences among passengers are simply not accounted for in the security processes.

A good example of this diversity emerged from the BEMOSA (Behavior Modeling for Security in Airports) Project. Close observations of passengers during the screening process discovered distinct stages where passengers and security employees actually negotiate over items screeners decide are prohibited to bring onboard.

These stages range from accepting the decision to more time-consuming (and costly) stages of negotiating (and even arguing and refusal). While this analysis was done to gauge the actual costs of screening security, what emerged was that by characterizing passengers on the simple basis of being a “charter” or “scheduled” flight passenger, we could predict how the negotiation process would develop.

Here is a clear case where passengers do make a critical impact on security processes. So, despite all the efforts to eliminate the human factor in airport security through greater use of sophisticated technology, airport security designers still have to face the unpleasant fact that passengers are the life blood of air transportation. Paying attention to them rather than ignoring them is rule number one for commercial survival.

---

*Prof Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum, founder and CEO of Kirschenbaum Consulting.

Body Scanner: Who says looks don’t count?

By Prof. Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

The recent decision of the TSA to replace one type of body scanner with another is, at first glance, a remarkable shift in policy for the agency that is the final arbitrator of all matters dealing with airport security. Even more surprising, this decision was brought about by the pressures of non-airport security stakeholders (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), and related to privacy issues rather than security.

Source: TSA blog

This shift in policy is, of course, a bit simplistic as the installation of alternative body scanners remains. The goal is to detect as fast as possible those persons who carry items deemed a threat to security. My emphasis on “as fast as possible” is the reason for body scanners as airport management is extremely sensitive to increasing “through-put,” that magical word that is directly linked to bottom line profits or losses. It is a technological fix that fits into the assembly line design of airports as a people-processing factory. But the technology does have its limits. And people aren’t always compliant.

This was brought home in an analysis, during the BEMOSA project, of the role that passengers play at screening check points. For conventional screening (and it seems for full body scanners as well), screening detection and threat avoidance is guided by rule compliance. The technology is very sophisticated, but we found that there was a problem with employees bending, breaking or ignoring the rules, and even more problematic was passenger behavior. Passengers argued and negotiated with the security employees! What we discovered was that security checking is a complex social process and not the simplistic picture of automated filtering by technology.

The critical time factor of the passenger negotiating over a prohibited item not only put the proverbial monkey wrench into the spokes of the technology, but was, in fact, the key to the flow affecting passenger “through-put.” Shaving off 2-5 seconds per passenger by an advanced algorithm paled in comparison to the time-consuming social process of negotiating whether to open a bag, go through the metal detector, refusal to give up an expensive bottle of whisky or even take off shoes!

So the TSA policy change is really no change at all as it still continues (with an internal logic of justification) to seek the design of a better mouse trap. But to do so there still remains the missing link – employees and passengers. Perhaps the king will realize he is naked only when the evidence proves it to be the case.

---

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

IATA’s new airport security vision neglect the human factor

By Prof. Alan (Avi) Kirschenbaum*

As part of its 2012 annual review, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has forecast that airline traffic is expected to rise to 3.6 billion passengers in 2016 from 2.8 billion in 2011.

The recent IATA review covers the issue of security as part of its comprehensive program to strengthen the air industry. Security, as we all know, has been prominent in public and scientific discussion and it is satisfying to note that the new vision for the checkpoint of the future (CoF) is one response to make airport and air travel more secure and pleasant for the passenger.

The emphasis of this effort appears to be primarily focused on technological means to enhance security – developing technology and software to enhance (API) advanced passenger information and (PRN) passenger name record information. The implication is that this will promote passenger flow-through and reduce inconvenience and “friction” for passengers during their airport experience.

The notable “missing link” in this vision is people. Certainly, technology is a critical part of airport security, but this perspective ignores the fact that the entire security decision-making process is in the hands of both employees and to some extent the passengers. Nor is there mention of the airport as a complex social organization within which employees and passengers interact with security technology within two distinct social and communications networks – the formal administrative and informal.

These extremely vital aspects presented in the IATA report are marginalized, as they do not reflect how security actually operates in reality.

It is here that the BEMOSA project has made a major contribution to providing an evidence-based depiction of the actual behavioral security decision-making process among a wide range of employees in airports distributed across Europe. The fact that up to 40 percent of the decision-makers bend, break and even ignore the rules; that security decisions are primarily made within groups; that most threats are assessed as false alarms; the degree to which employees trust security technology and to which the opinions of friends directly impacts on rule compliance are the reality of security in airports.

These findings can be integrated into the checkpoint of the future by recognizing that technology is only one component in the airport triumvirate for not only enhancing security but also making airports viable business organizations.

---

The writer is the initiator and coordinator of BEMOSA (Behavioral Modeling of Security in Airports). This article was first published in i-HLS Web site.*