Security Expert Breaks Down Future of Airport Safety

12.11.2024 - 22:05 / travelpulse.com / North America / Rich Thomaselli

From the incredible number of firearms confiscated by the Transportation Security Administration to hackers taking over operations, airport security is under fire.

And the only way to fight it is to keep up with the times, so to speak. To change, evolve and become as sophisticated as the bad guys.

To that end, TravelPulse spoke with airport security expert Sunil Mudholkar, Vice President of Product, Hexagon Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial.

For starters, judging by the more than 5,000 illegal weapons confiscated by the TSA this year, the agency is doing the best that it can with the number of workers it has. But...

“The days of just having your eyes on the glass are probably over,” he said. “Today, you have analytics being built into cameras and much more. There is more infrastructure to invest in that has incredible capabilities. There has been a rapid advancement in terms of the capability of modern cameras.”

But there is still a human element.

“There still has to be a level of risk assessment,” he said. “Technology leaders will make that assessment no matter where you are, even in the financial industry, for instance, or in travel or any sort of manufacturing. There is inherently some risk you have to model into your business operations. Travel is no exception. You have to plan for risk assessment down to zero or close to it. There will always be ambiguous visitors. So I think a lot of it has to do with checks and balances.”

But timing is of the essence, he said.

“For example, entering and exiting a parking lot. If an airport wants to connect their system to the local law enforcement database of illegal license plates on the watch list, then it has to be done today,” Mudholkar said.  “Physical security for us is moving from a 10-dimensional space to a three-dimensional. Physical security incidents are happening on a more frequent basis, and that information is being processed in detail. That information has to be shared with the right people.”

But this isn’t something new, he said. It dates all the way back to the most infamous breach of airport security ever, September 11, 2001.

“Since 9/11 there has been an increase in the number of entities that share information faster and more collaboratively,” he said.

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