The security environment at airports changes faster than most people outside this industry realise. New threats appear before the old ones are fully understood. Regulations follow months behind, sometimes years. Hybrid tactics that were theoretical three years ago show up in real operational scenarios today. And behind all of it, an expectation from boards, from regulators, from passengers, that the person responsible for security already has the answers.
Nobody can keep up with all of it alone. I mean that literally.
What makes aviation security different
There is something specific about aviation security that most people, even inside the industry, do not fully appreciate. Every airport that belongs to this network has made a deliberate, collective choice to be transparent with each other about how they do this work. Not formally transparent. Genuinely transparent.
They share operational data. They share what went wrong. They visit each other’s operations and sit in each other’s briefings. They have the honest conversations that never appear in any official publication. The reason this works is straightforward: better security at one airport makes every airport safer. If a security director works out something important about checkpoint flow under pressure and shares that openly with a colleague, everyone benefits. There is nothing to lose by sharing. You cannot copy another airport’s model directly anyway. Every airport is different. Different layout, different passenger mix, different local regulatory context, different organisational culture. What you take from a colleague is not their solution. You take how they thought through the problem.
This level of openness across an entire industry is genuinely unusual. I have worked in other sectors. The willingness to be this transparent — across airports, manufacturers, authorities, and specialists, when airports are technically competing for airlines, for passengers, for investment — is rare. It exists because the people in this community have made a clear collective decision: staying ahead of the threats matters more than any competitive edge.
The condition
But there is a condition. The network only works if you contribute to it.
You have to show up. Share what you know. Be honest when something failed in your own operation, because that is where the real learning is. People who only take — who accumulate contacts and never give anything back — drift out. Nobody announces it. Nobody sends a formal notice. You just stop getting the call.
Lars and I have been part of this community for a long time. I chaired the ACI Security Committee, at both European and global level, for several years and remain active in it. Through that work, and through every bilateral visit, every industry session, and the conversations that happen long after the formal programme ends, we have built relationships across the international aviation security community that go beyond professional acquaintance. These are people we have disagreed with. People we have learned from. People who have called us at difficult moments because they needed to think something through with someone they trusted.
That network is one of the most concrete assets we bring to the airports we work with.
What it means in practice
Here is what that actually means in practice. We take on a project where we need local knowledge we do not hold directly. We contact the people we know. We get an honest picture of the operational culture, the regulatory context, the real pressures at that specific entity. That is not something you find in any published document. It lives in the people who have worked there and know the terrain.
Or we need expertise on a specific technical or operational matter that goes beyond what Lars and I hold individually. We call someone with dedicated knowledge on exactly that challenge. Not through a procurement search. We call someone specific because we have worked alongside them, we know what they are capable of, and we trust their judgement. That is what happens when the relationships are real.
This is the difference between a contact list and a network. A contact list is static. A network is alive. It gives you honest answers from people who have already been where you are going. In a crisis, it gives you a call back in an hour from someone who understands your situation without needing two hours of background.