Recently, Mary Jo Manzaneres of Fly Away Cafe, caught our attention while commenting on our post on a United Flight Diversion. She is a Flight Attendant and her blog is not just about air travel, our focus, but places to go on the ground as well.
In a post earlier, she reports on Miami International Airport’s plan to train all airport workers in behavior pattern recognition. We commented last month on this technique, pioneered by El Al Israeli Airlines and we have always been big fans of their security methods. You cannot argue with results. Despite the various terror attacks aimed at Israel, there hasn’t been an incident on an El Al aircraft in decades.
In various places, including Boston’s Logan Airport, pilot programs have trained employees to look for suspicious behavior. Miami officials go a step further by planning to train all 35,000 employees, even the janitors, to be on the lookout.
We continue to hope that in matters of security, personnel walk an uneasy line. They should constantly be balancing fears of being overly cautious with fears of being overly lax. But by training all airport staff to be on the lookout, we hope that it will reduce the number of false alarms, if nothing else. We hope it does not create additional false alarms, which it has the danger of doing.
We ultimately believe that most people who are in an airport to work or even just travel are interested in keeping our airports and skies safe, so we suggest we all keep in mind the words the government advises in public places: If you see suspicious activity, report it. Training like behavior pattern recognition will help people learn how to recognize this type of activity in the best way possible.
