Safe Passage Security Training Blog

Every year as we approach summer, I see news articles, social media postings, and even talk radio exasperating about how bad the busy travel season will be. The focus is generally on the traveler experience. True, already busy and cramped airports will become even more busy and cramped during the high travel season. This makes the travel experience more stressful and most certainly less fun.

The security checkpoint is usually one of the most congested places in an airport. Thousands of passengers are trying to get from landside to airside as quickly and easily as possible. The passengers are generally a mix of seasoned travelers and seasonal travelers. The latter is usually excited to be getting underway while the prior is just trying to get through the system.

Security screeners play a huge role in helping both groups get through screening as safely and efficiently as possible. Who better to ask about little things passengers can do to make the screening process and the job of a security screener a little easier this summer season. So that’s what we did.

In the aviation security world, conventional X-ray systems are still the dominant technology used to screen baggage and cargo. The technology is proven, stable, and holds up well to the operational demands of an airport. However, one of the biggest challenges for screeners is trying to interpret what’s inside a passenger’s baggage using a ‘flat’ or two-dimensional (2D) image.

As three-dimensional (3D) X-ray systems continue to improve, we can expect more of them to be widely deployed at airports. Meanwhile, X-ray screeners will have to learn how to shift from 2D to 3D X-ray interpretation.

The Dress – over 73 million page views on the original Tumblr post and 480,000+ notes after just 2.5 days. Why is there all this fuss about the color of that dress? As reported by almost every social media outlet on the planet, some see white and gold and others see blue and black. It just shows us how funny the human brain can be. Somehow the picture of that dress destroys the brain’s ability to discern between colors.

I saw one post that said, “It is a collision of color, illumination, and reflection.” I thought it was very interesting that “illumination” was used to describe this phenomenon. What I found, doing a little old fashioned research, is that it’s very easy (especially in photographs) to change the perceived color of an object by changing the illumination.

At the start of every year, experts release trends and predictions for the airline and air cargo industries. As usual, there is a lot of information floating around and it’s sometimes difficult to make sense of it all. This is especially true as we look at regional anomalies that don’t align with broader global trends.

Having said all that, I’ve conducted a little research, gathered the most interesting information, and assembled them here just for you. Let’s take a look at current aviation industry trends, predictions for 2015, and advice from the experts.