The Bureau of Civil Aviation Safety (BCAS) has issued an advisory, tightening safety measures for cargo (parcels) and mail, particularly those who exceed 500 gm in weight, earlier than they’re loaded onto industrial plane, with a view “to preclude chance of any act of illegal interfernce with civial aviation operations.”
These measures underscore the duty of Regulated Brokers and Plane Operators, each home and overseas, for checking what’s loaded onto the plane. Whereas the measures themselves are nothing new, the advisory stresses that the brokers and operators ought to “meticulously implement” the safety procedures which might be in vogue for acceptance and screening of cargo and mail.
Visible inspection
The advisory requires the brokers and operators to ensure that the contents of the cargo match their description within the delivery paperwork. It requires visible inspection or profiling of the cargo to ensure that there aren’t any indicators of tampering.
“All involved stakeholders shall additionally improve vigilance for shipments originating from areas deemed excessive danger and contemplate making use of of a number of screening strategies.” These strategies ought to embrace x-ray and bodily search. Moreover, the cargo and mail “shall be escorted by the safety workers of the involved entity until loading onto the designated plane. The advisory additionally emphasises strict adherence to the rules associated to entry management to cargo premises, to “stop unauthorised interference.”
The business believes that the advisory has been issued within the wake of the “pager detonation” incidents in Lebanon.
J Krishnan of the Chennai-based Natesa Iyer LLC, a number one freight forwarder, famous that the advisory is silent on minimal tools requirements to implement its suggestions and particular person discretion is advocated.
“This may range considerably with the bottom personnel certified to display screen;excessive terminal operators may exert passive affect to maintain notion of their cargo operations from being thought-about antagonistic from the consumer viewpoint.”
“Some quantity of scaling may be achieved solely when x-ray scanning is complemented by a handheld spectrophotometer. Nevertheless, the drawback is present handheld home equipment lack the vary and should be held very near the scanned parcel to be efficient,” he stated.
Low vapourisation
Plastic IED can’t be detected in steel scanners, and solely the vapours may be picked up by spectrometry. The plastic explosives poses an enormous problem attributable to their low vapourisation
“Except an enormous funding is made in state of artwork detection tools and strong revengineering of the safety course of is applied we’ll stay weak,” he stated.
In a number of the worldwide airports, IEDs are often detected by a chemical swab based mostly take a look at. Mixed with x-ray it ought to be efficient, stated a supply.
The latest pager explosions in Lebanon and Syria that killed a dozen and injured over 3,000 have certainly opened a pandora’s field for the worldwide logistics business.
Stories recommend using PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) that evades detection utilizing standard explosive detection methods due its low vapourisation and natural content material, stated R Vittal Raj, an skilled on security-related issues.
“The pager explosions have introduced again explosives of the style of PETN to mild. Now each cell, digital and computing tools able to communication would should be suspected. This additionally accentuates the traditional challenges of detecting such explosives hid in apart from objects able to communication,” Raj stated. He known as for using synthetic intelligence to collect intelligence on threats.