Tel Aviv's Ben Guiron Airport Is Known As One Of The World's Most Secure Airports

First Posted: May 31, 2016 10:05 AM EDT
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As countries around the world fear the security of flights leaving their airport, more and more officials are turning to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel to understand what the world's most secure airport does differently.

According to CNN, the airport is considered to be one of the safest in the world. It has layers of security, however, only a number is seen by the millions of passengers who pass through every year.

In reports, it was determined that there has never been a flight that left the airport that has ever been hijacked. There has also not been a terrorist attack at the airport since 1972, when members of the Japanese Red Army killed 16 people and wounded dozens in a shooting rampage.

Ksbw.com also reported that the security starts in the Airport Security Operations Center which is located near the airport. The small space is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It monitors every flight within the Israeli airspace which transit flights and nearby aircraft. Every flight, passenger, and each member of the flight crew are checked even before arriving in Israeli airspace. There has never been a moment without pressure. If ever there is an aircraft that went off-course, or a flight without a proper security clearance is immediately flagged.

The manager of the operations center for Israel's Ministry of Transportation, Dvir Rubinshtein, said that they flag and checks at least 10 planes a day.  

Ben Guiron is Israel's only major international airport. If ever the airport closes, this would effectively cut off all of Israel from the air. "There is, every day, a situation where we have such concerns [about a flight]," said Rubinshtein, "and we check that and verify that everything is security cleared."

Next month, Ben Gurion airport is set to host visitors from 40 different countries to discuss airport security, officials say. The interest in Israeli airport security has grown after the attacks in Brussels, the crash of MetroJet Flight 9268, and now EgyptAir Flight 804.

The airport is a small airport which can handle 20% of the passengers of London's Heathrow International Airport and 15% of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which just signed a cooperation agreement with Ben Guiron.

Some of the security measures employed at the airport are not scalable to larger hubs, but "some fundamental principles and some best practices can be deployed in other parts of the world," said aviation security expert Shalom Dolev. "It's not a copy and paste because it's not a situation where one size fits all."

Critics have accused both Israel and the United States of racial profiling as part of their aviation security procedures. Dolev said that their kind of security is one they call, risk-based security. Palestinians and Arabs passing through Ben Gurion say they are more likely to be stopped, searched, and questioned. . Last year, Israel's High Court of Justice refused to ban racial profiling in a case brought by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. The court did leave the door open for the group to file a case in the future.

Security expert Dolev says the Israeli tactics are risk-based security and don't amount to "profiling."

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