Israel's top 10 airport security technologies, I

In the mid-1970s the New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a harried air hostess pushing a food cart down the aisle of a crowded passenger plane flying to Tel Aviv. One of the passengers, dressed in traditional Arab robe and head gear, pulls a gun and aims it at the hostess. The hostess, without missing a beat, continues to push the food cart past the gun-wielding passenger, and as she passes by him, matter-of-factly, says: “This plane is already hijacked.”

No-one understands security as the Israelis do, and this is why some of the world’s best new innovative airport security technologies are being developed in Israel. ISRAEL21c’s Karin Kloosterman offers a list of Israel’s top 10 air port security technologies.

Since the foiled Christmas Day attempt on a Detroit-bound plane, airport authorities around the world are in a race to find novel solutions to fight terror. The strategies and technical tactics Israel has adopted feature high on their lists. Rafi Sela, a top security consultant and former chief security officer at the Israel Airport Authority, explains that there are reasons why Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport has been kept terror free. “Israel concentrates on the passengers and not their luggage so we have a real edge over the rest of the world in protecting travelers,” he says. “This is in addition to us protecting the whole airport, while the others merely try to achieve aviation security,” he told Kloosterman.

Sela advises governments and airport authorities all over the world. He has become the leading figure advocating Israel’s unique approach to airport security in the past six years.

Through his company AR Challenges, he uses approaches and technology services rooted in Israeli innovation to try to help his clients stay one-step ahead of potential terrorists. The global transportation security consultancy, of which he is president, works with high profile clients including Canada’s RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals, and airports around the world.

Making use of homegrown technologies, some of them developed by whiz-kids in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Intelligence Corps 8200 army unit, Sela believes that Israel’s strength in airport security is because it boasts near-invisible protective “rings” of security around the airport and passengers.

Most airports around the world often lack measures as basic as video surveillance, he explains. “The airports are so concentrated on finding your bottles of water and perfumes that they don’t even look at you,” says Sela. “The security personnel forget