Global airlines' body IATA has expressed outrage at the terror attack at Istanbul airport but also said that moving passengers faster to the airside of an airport could help mitigate the risk.
"Once again, innocent travelers have been attacked in a cowardly and murderous act. Our thoughts are with the victims, and their families and friends ... The (latest) attack was a broad attack on our shared humanity. But terrorism will never succeed in reversing the interconnectedness of the world," said Tony Tyler, IATA's Director General and CEO.
"The safety and security of passengers are our top priorities. This tragedy in Istanbul and the one in Brussels earlier show that there is a growing challenge for governments to keep people safe in the 'landside' parts of the airport.
"Moving people 'airside' more quickly can help to mitigate risk. The industry has a number of initiatives in place to achieve that aim and we are working with governments and airports to implement them," the IATA chief said.
Airside, as against 'landside', is part of an airport which is near the aircraft, that is after security check, customs and passport control. The attacks at Brussels and Istanbul have taken place on the landside of the airports.
"If we can reduce the amount of congestion, the amount of queuing, we will also reduce the vulnerability of airport crowds, to terrorist outrages like we saw" in Istanbul and Brussels, he said.
Responding to questions on email, Tyler pointed towards the long queues which form on the landside during check-in, security or immigration and said "governments in the short time need to make sure they've got enough resources to keep the queues moving. In the medium term though, what we need to do is prevent these lines from happening in the first place."
Maintaining that IATA was working on a 'smarter security' scheme, he said "we are working with (global airports body) Airports Council International to implement new technologies to visual, all-risk based systems of security screening so that we can actually get rid of these lines altogether by doing things a bit smarter.
"We need to improve facilitation at airports, we need to
go for more alternative systems, and we need to make sure that everybody can have his boarding card on his mobile phone or print it out at home so he doesn't have to queue up at a check -in desk.
"Home printed bag tags, we now have a standard for those, we are trying to get those adopted so that people won't be queuing up to drop their bags off, the bag will already be tagged before they even get to the airport," Tyler said.
On aviation safety, the IATA chief said "overall, it's a very safe time for the industry. I mean last year's safety performance beat the 5 year average, although of course we had a couple of terrible tragedies last year which were not accidents. They were caused deliberately by human action."
"We are tightening up our IATA operations safety audit IOSA which has become a global benchmark and safety management for some 400 of the world's top airlines.
"That's now becoming a system of continual assessment and a continual safety management rather than just a snapshot every couple of years and we are encouraging governments all around the world to adopt it as a part of their regulatory regime," Tyler said.
To questions on the current financial outlook of the global aviation industry, the IATA chief said "we are forecasting improvement for performance of 2016 over 2015. We are looking for an industry profit globally this year from 39.4 billion dollars, which will be a record level."
He said one of the factors was the low fuel price but overall, the industry is in a better condition than it was some time ago, with profitability, load factors showing positive improvement with more efficient equipment being used.
