Aviation security suspect, Air India probe told

Ottawa: International aviation security relies too much on unqualified civil servants rather than people with practical experience, an international aviation security expert told the Air India inquiry today.
"It's a subject about which I feel quite strongly," said Rodney Wallis, international civil aviation security consultant, who provides an aviation security consultancy service to governments, airport and airline managements.
Wallis took direct aim at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which is responsible for auditing airline and airport safety around the world, noting that it relies on member countries to supply appointees to its security audit team.
The commission of inquiry is investigating the 1985 terrorist bombing of Air India Flight 182 in which 329 people were killed.
"I don't necessarily accept that civil servants have any right necessarily to consider themselves expert in aviation security unless they have worked in the field, unless they have a background of experience of airport and airline handling," said Wallis, who is author of How Safe Are Our Skies?
ICAO has 190-member countries that agree with security and industry standards and are subject to audits by the ICAO auditing wing, consisting of people appointed by their respective nations.
"I don't accept that you can pick a person out and train for one or two or three or four weeks and say he is competent," Wallis said. "I don't accept it because there is so much about an airport, an airline operation that has to be understood and it can't be learned at a desk in three or four weeks," Wallis said.
Between 1980 and 1991, Wallis was security director for the International Air Transport Association (IATA), and directed the airline industry's aviation security activity. As a member of the ICAO ad hoc panel of aviation security experts created to respond to the bombing of Air India Flight 182, Wallis drafted elements of ICAO's third (1986) and fourth (1989) editions of Annex 17 (Security) to the Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation.
04/05/07 Richard Brennan/Toronto Star

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Categories: Air India Jun 2007, Foreign Jun 2007, Safety Jun 2007