Comment
Wasting millions on airport security
June 1st 2014
The cost of screening the 3.3 billion airline passengers who pass through the world’s airports each year is estimated at around $33 billion. Add in time and hassle to the experience and the figure doubles say industry experts. Read More »
The numbers are startling. An example is Australia. The combined annual cost of security at Sydney’s international and domestic airports was $9 million in 2001. By 2012, it had risen to $76 million for the year. Australian government statistics report the annual cost of Australian aviation security jumped from $30 million 13 years ago to $250 million in 2012.
These increases are being duplicated across the Asia-Pacific airport network. It is a massive burden on an industry struggling to earn a return on its investment. More alarming is the mounting evidence that much of the money being spent on security at airports is unnecessary.
An academic paper published in March – and it’s not the first research document to reach such conclusions – suggested that additional security measures to protect airports are not “sensible expenditures” because the likelihood of an attack is low.
Its authors assessed security measures would only begin to be cost-effective if the current rate of attacks at airports in the Asia-Pacific, the U.S. and Europe increased by a factor of 10 to 20.
Therein lays the rub. Unlike aviation safety, no cost/benefit analysis is applied to aviation security. Since the 9/11 terror attacks in the U.S., layer upon layer of security has been added to airport check-in procedures without proper systems of matching the cost with genuine levels of threat.
Statistically, in the last 13 years, attacks on aviation targets represented only 0.5% of all terrorist events world-wide. Yet, as Andrew Herdman, director general of the Association of Asia pacific Airlines (AAPA) pointed out to Orient Aviation, we still, by default, treat every passenger as a potential terrorist when in reality they are innocent travellers.
The truth is airports not very attractive terrorist targets. If the goal of the terrorist is to kill people and inflict physical damage, there are many easier places to detonate a bomb or undertake an armed attack.
Airlines, therefore, want to see commonsense, intelligence-led, outcome-based measures for security that balance the risks of attack against the costs and inconvenience imposed on travelers when they fly. This approach has been very successful in the safety sector of the industry. As hard as it will be to persuade law-makers to get smarter about aviation security policies, applying cost-benefit analysis to security must become an industry priority – and sooner rather than later.
