Security at airports
With the car under a passenger plane – how can that happen?
A man managed to get under a plane at Hamburg Airport by car
© Martin Ziemer / Getty Images
The hostage-taking at Hamburg airport is over. Now the question arises: Why can someone drive a car into the security zone of an airport?
Passenger Roland Kaminski actually wants to go to Dubai with his wife and son, with a departure on Saturday Hamburg. But an armed 35-year-old, with his four-year-old daughter hostage, drove his car through barriers at the airport, except for the apron, and threw incendiary devices near an airplane. What angers passenger Kaminski much more than the fact that air traffic was suspended for hours is that the man was even able to get onto the airport grounds. On Saturday evening he asked the question that also concerns many other passengers and people on social media: “How can this happen?”
It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that the hostage-taker gave up, he was arrested, and the child was unharmed. Despite the happy ending, the fear of even worse, more consequential actions remains. “We are checked through everything. Here again, there again, there again – and he comes here in his car and can break through the security systems,” complains Kaminski. That was completely incomprehensible to him. “Honestly, there’s something wrong going on.”
Unlike in many places where security bollards that are retractable into the ground prevent unauthorized vehicles from passing, at Hamburg Airport red and white barriers actually seem to have been the only obstacle for the 35-year-old on his way into the security area.
Already people on the airfield several times
And it wasn’t the first such incident at German airports. It was only in July that climate activists from the Last Generation group cut open the airport fence at Hamburg Airport, rode rental bikes towards the tarmac and stuck themselves to the access roads in several places. The result: nothing happened at the airport for hours. The airports in Berlin and Munich recently experienced something similar.
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The verdict of aviation expert Heinrich Großbongardt, who previously worked at Lufthansa, Boeing and the Cockpit pilots’ association, is correspondingly harsh: “Hamburg airport is not safe – and neither are other airports in Germany,” he tells Spiegel “. It is a scandal. Airports “have been known as preferred targets for terrorists for decades. There are planes on the aprons with tens of thousands of liters of kerosene in their stomachs and hundreds of passengers on board.” Großbongardt therefore calls the airport operators and authorities “incredibly naive”.
Police union calls for improvements
The current approach is no longer sufficient for the German Police Union (DPolG). “It is difficult to convey that Christmas markets, for example, are secured with concrete barricades, and our airports, as high-security areas, are neglected by operators,” says DPolG Federal Vice President Heiko Teggatz to the dpa. Politicians are doing far too little about this. “I also miss an initiative from Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.”
The Aviation Security Act stipulates, among other things, that in order to protect against attacks, airport operators are obliged to “secure the airside areas against unauthorized access and, insofar as they are security areas or sensitive parts of the security areas, to only allow access to persons who are specifically authorized to do so.” .
Hamburg Airport denies guilt
Accordingly, Hamburg Airport itself is not aware of any omissions. “The security of the site complies with all legal requirements and largely exceeds them,” says a spokeswoman for the dpa. Nevertheless, given the size of the airport – it covers almost 800 football fields – it cannot be ruled out that “highly criminal, unauthorized access to the security area can occur using brute force.”
In order to ensure the safety of air traffic, in addition to structural measures, alarm chains were also established, “which worked perfectly.” As a result of the actions of the last generation, there are no new requirements for critical infrastructure facilities. The airport is currently testing new camera and fence sensor systems. “In addition, the patrolling of the fence by security forces has been sustainably increased.” She doesn’t want to comment on the barriers, which are obviously easy to break, but only writes: “Please understand that we do not provide any further information about the security concept.”