Miami’s Airport: How to Secure a Monster

Miami’s Airport: How to Secure a Monster

אילוסטרציה (123rf)

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

How do you keep airport runways safe and clean? That’s how it’s done at Miami’s huge airport.

Illustration (123rf)
Illustration (123rf)

The presence of unidentified objects, people, vehicles and unauthorized aircraft on airport runways is a significant aviation threat. Routine measures are undertaken at civilian and military airports to locate these foreign objects – in military airports, for example, squads of soldiers routinely scan runways for any anomaly.

The Miami Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, a gateway into the Caribbean and Latin America serving over 40 million passengers annually. A wide variety of measures and technologies protect taxiways and runways from dangerous objects such as people, vehicles and aircraft. One of the Airport’s directors, Ray Davalos, went into detail about the defense and alert system keeping the airport’s runways clean, a system designed and implemented by two companies: The Israeli NICE Systems and the American UNICOM.

The Federal Aviation Authority in the United States defines runway incursion as an event occurring in the vicinity of the airport’s runways, involving vehicles, aircraft, people or objects obstructing the runways, leading to a threat of collision between them and an aircraft attempting to land or take off.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

offshore_650x90

Davalos explained that the airport has installed runway incursion detection systems as part of a special, 10 million-dollar project, including recording systems, video, tracking cameras, GPS and sensors. At the heart of the project is the NICE Situator, improving real-time response and detection capabilities, locating unidentified objects and facilitating quick response in order to mitigate any possible damage caused by an accident or a security breach. The system fuses information received from visual means such as video camera, sensors, tracking radars and communication systems, all of which alert quick response teams in real time.

Davalos added that the integration of all these measures is aimed at keeping the runways safe and clean. “The system can locate people, vehicles and unidentified or unauthorized objects on the primary and secondary runways which might pose a threat or cause a disturbance. It automatically sends alerts to the command center and to quick response units. NICE’s visual measures and video analytics solutions aid the airport authorities in locating and reporting unidentified objects. Identification is precise, alerts are quick and almost never false.”

NICE company representatives added that the system installed in the Miami Airport is capable of analyzing and cross-referencing data received from a large number of systems, such as PTZ cameras tracking the targets, video, radar, sensors and communications. Yaron Tchwella, NICE Security Group President, added that “the Miami Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world. The NICE Situator event management system is an example of efficient management of resources and existing technologies at airports, providing solutions for security and safety challenges.”

Source: Government Security News