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Aviation History
2003
2003 - 2933.PDF
sj;^*"f **r Security Plans for biometric screening seem to have taken a back seat DAVID LEARMOUNT/ OPERATIONS AND SAFETY EDITOR A t times like these, with the Iraq conflict continuing, a failure of security could be a safety disas ter. Safety and security have always been inextricably linked in the minds of passengers, despite the fact that accidents are inadvertent events, while a security failure can result in the intentional destruction of an aircraft. There has been no let-up in the pursuit of improved pre-flight security arrange ments, particularly in the USA, but no innovation there in the last year either. The plan to embed memory chips in machine-readable travel documents (MRTD) containing individual digitalised biometric data has gone quiet compared with the push for it a year ago. This seems to be because there are some doubts as to its cost-effectiveness - for the cost will be huge. Security agencies were hoping that scanning a chipped MRTD would not only reduce the likelihood of identity fraud, but identify people sought by intelligence sources, or recognise crimi nals, from a massive database. It is begin ning to emerge that, at present, there are no biometric technologies with a sufficiently high level of accuracy to check characteris tics infallibly against a huge database. Reducing identity fraud will probably work, however, because if the system can read who a person claims to be and check the embedded biometric data against a real-time scan of the person's face, hand or iris, it does not need a huge database. The question now arises as to whether simply reducing identity document fraud is worth the trouble, because if an intending sabo teur is unknown, or cannot be recognised from a worldwide database without a huge number of false alarms, the investment would not be money well spent. The terrorists who took over the four air craft used as weapons on 11 September 2001 entered the USA with travel docu- Despite ments that were not fraudulent. It was just tighter not known that they had terrorist intent. security at So the plan for digitised MRTDs and the airports, use of biometrics is still going ahead, but it there are may take longer than planned. Agencies like new risks the International Air Transport Association, the International Civil Aviation Organi sation and the US Department of Home land Security are all waiting to see if biomet rics technology can be tuned up to a virtually zero failure/false-alarm rate. Innocent passengers At the moment the USA and others are putting their faith in a plan to embed at least two biometric scans for each person in the MRTD chip, which would reduce the chances of people actually being misidenti- fied as criminal or as fit to be detained - a pretty daunting prospect for hapless inno cent passengers. At present a combination of facial scan and fingerprint or hand scan seems to be the favourite, but the cost/ben efit questions have to be answered. Meanwhile, as at the end of 2002, the end of 2003 has seen a civil airliner subjected to a close shave with a man-portable air defence system (manpads) surface-to-air missile. Last year it was an Arkia Boeing 757 at Mombasa, where two manpads just missed the aircraft and did not damage it. This year an Airbus A300 freighter - operated by DHL subsidiary European Air Transport - outbound from Baghdad was hit by one and its wingtip set on fire. The crew, by acting fast to land back at Baghdad, saved themselves and their air craft, but it was a close-run thing. The Israelis are working, not only on fitting their entire civil airline fleet with countermeasures sys tems, but on a system for identifying "risk" manpads launch areas in the vicinity of air ports that their aircraft use, so security forces would know how best to carry out area sur veillance as efficiently as possible. That is rel atively easy for a small nation with a small airline industry, but the dilemmas remain for nations which have a large number of large airlines. The airlines can only take limited com fort from a study of the recent history of manpads use against transport aircraft (Flight International, 2-8 December). Missiles do not distinguish between civil and military transport aircraft, and there have been 26 known attacks on those two aircraft categories, of which 19 have been fatal. But only one was perpetrated using a manpads outside a known conflict zone and that was the Arkia event, where both missiles missed their target. The DHL A300 was in a conflict zone where a known large supply of former Iraqi military manpads is known to exist. Most nations' policies of using intelligence to warn of high-risk areas to which airline ser vices should be suspended will have to con tinue, and so will research on cost-effective countermeasures systems for civil aircraft. www.flightinternational.com FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 23 DECEMBER 2003 - 5 JANUARY 2004 35
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