Psychology and Security
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the security of our airports have been under extreme scrutiny. Trillions of dollars have been used in the operation of the TSA where a huge sum of that money is being used in highly advanced technological systems (Herstein, Mikti). Although these systems are state of the art, there still remains many flaws as the operations are run by human individuals.
El Al airlines, the flag carrier of Israel, employs a different technique in screening its passengers. In addition to the normal security procedures encountered at most international airports, El Al interviews every one of its passengers. The airline trains its staff extensively to use “psychology” rather than “technology” for security measures (Herstein, Mikti, Jaffe). The airline gets a list of the passengers on each flight and compares it to the list of suspicious passengers from the Israeli intelligence. Rather than using full body scanners that can cause passengers much discomfort, El Al finds researches information on all of its passengers and looks for suspicious clues such as when reservations were made and how tickets were purchased. The interrogation tactics used by El Al are often aggressive and unpredictable with those from Arab and Palestinian descent facing additional questioning (Fraley, Shaver).
El Al also uses a mix of psychology and technology in its airline with all of its cabin crew having served in the Israeli military. The cockpit door is closed before passengers board the plane, opened after all the passengers have disembarked and never opened during the flight (Stevenage, Guest). Even during an incident when a hijacker had shot a stewardess and were holding two hand grenades the pilot refused to open the cockpit door. The crew and passengers were able to overpower the hijackers. Luggage is also passed through regular x-ray screening and then placed in a pressurized box which detonates any explosives. On every flight, up to five armed sky marshals are aboard the aircraft to prevent any potential danger (Hayward, Erik, Tamaryn).
The cost of using these security tactics cost the airline $90 million a year. Overall, the security measures being used has been very effective without having a single tragedy in over 40 years (Fraley).
Figure 1: Chart showing the layers of security in an Israeli Airport
References
Herstein, R. and Mitki, Y. (2008) ‘How El Al Airlines transformed its service strategy with employee participation’, Strategy & Leadership Journal, 36(3), pp. 21–25. doi: 10.1108/10878570810870758.
Herstein, R., Mitki, Y. and Jaffe, E.D. (2008) ‘Communicating a new corporate image during privatization: The case of El al airlines’, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 13(4), pp. 380–393. doi: 10.1108/13563280810914810.
Fraley, R. Chris; Shaver, Phillip R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 75(5), Nov 1998, 1198-1212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.5.1198
Sarah V. Stevenage, Richard M. Guest, Combining Forces: Data fusion across man and machine for biometric analysis, Image and Vision Computing Journal, 2016
Hayward J. Godwin, Erik D. Reichle, Tamaryn Menneer, Modeling Lag-2 Revisits to Understand Trade-Offs in Mixed Control of Fixation Termination During Visual Search, Cognitive Science Journal, 2016
