Military Briefing 4

Airport Security

STANAG 2

I have been invited to give you a briefing on the security at this international airport. As you all
know, this is the worlds biggest and busiest international airport and we deal with over
240,000 people a day in each of the 4 terminals. Each terminal has over 3000 flights per day
with 280 different destinations.
As you can imagine, we handle hundreds of thousands of pieces of luggage. We must check
each piece of luggage separately to make sure that passengers have not placed bombs or
dangerous materials in their cases. We also check luggage for illegal items, such as drugs
and often use special electronic equipment to detect them. The most effective equipment we
have for finding drugs, however, are our specially trained sniffer dogs. These dogs
constantly walk up and down the luggage conveyor belt and carousels, sniffing luggage for all
kinds of illegal substances.
The area we use for luggage handling is approximately the size of 4 football fields.
Another major problem is, of course, air traffic control. Separation, or distance between
aircraft on take-off or landing is about 4 kilometres, or 50 seconds, so there isnt much time for
controllers or pilots to react if there is a problem.
This brings me to the main reason for this briefing. As yet, there has been no press release,
but yesterday, security staff were attacked in the luggage processing area of the airport at
approximately 0630 hours. This was a surprise attack, but airport ant-terrorist police acted
swiftly and returned fire on the people whom we now know to be terrorists from the Peoples
National Liberation Army, or PNLA. The gun-battle lasted for about 25 minutes and the
surviving attackers surrendered to airport police. Two of the 4 attackers were killed several
employees injured. The main problem was that the terrorists had been employed as security
guards 2 months ago. Their backgrounds were not properly investigated, so we have now
decided to renew our employee background-check system completely. This will mean the
introduction of a very rigorous vetting procedure during the next 2 weeks and will include all
airport personnel. Rest assured, the situation is totally under control.