Supplement to MTI Study on Selective Passenger Screening in the Mass Transit Rail Environment, MTI Report 09-05

This supplement updates and adds to MTIs 2007 report on Selective Screening of Rail Passengers (Jenkins and Butterworth MTI 07-06: Selective Screening of Rail Passengers). The report reviews current screening programs implemented (or planned) by nine transit agencies, identifying best practices. The authors also discuss why three other transit agencies decided not to implement passenger screening at this time. The supplement reconfirms earlier conclusions that selective screening is a viable security option, but that effective screening must be based on clear policies and carefully managed to avoid perceptions of racial or ethnic profiling, and that screening must have public support. The supplement also addresses new developments, such as vapor-wake detection canines, continuing challenges, and areas of debate. Those interested should also read MTI S-09-01 Rail Passenger Selective Screening Summit

Fitness-to-fly and the safety role of air cabin crew: personal, social and managerial challenges

Andrea Sander-Grout investigated the impact of cabin crew fitness-to-fly on flight safety and public health. She found that there is significant uncertainty surrounding crewmember exposure to occupational hazards, with potential impacts on flight safety, individual and public health. Aviation and public health stakeholders are using her results in policy development

Airport service quality and passenger satisfaction : the impact of service failure on the likelihood of promoting an airport online

Based on the analysis of 2278 online passenger ratings of airports worldwide, this study uses a standard multinomial logit model to determine the likelihood of a passenger being a promoter of an airport when a service attribute has failed, controlling for several passenger and airport characteristics. Results show that failures associated with airport staff and queueing times are most likely to reduce the probability of a passenger being a promoter of an airport. Failures associated with airport shopping and wifi service are least likely to do so. More importantly, the failure of any service attribute in this study significantly reduces the probability of a passenger being a promoter of an airport. This suggests that all parts of the airport value chain are likely to suffer when a service attribute fails. Passenger and airport characteristics included in this study do not add significant explanation to whether a passenger becomes a promoter. Keywords: airport service quality, service failure, online ratings, airport value chain, passenger satisfactionpublishedVersio

Airport code/spaces

Nearly all aspects of passenger air travel from booking a ticket to checking-in, passing through security screening, buying goods in duty free, baggage-handling, flying, air traffic control, customs and immigration checks are now mediated by software and multiple information systems. Airports, as we have previously argued (Dodge and Kitchin 2004), presently consist of complex, over-lapping assemblages to varying degrees dependent on a myriad of software systems to function, designed to smooth and increase passenger flows through various ‘contact’ points in the airport (as illustrated in Figure 1) and to enable pervasive surveillance to monitor potential security threats. Airport spaces – the check-in areas, security check-points, shopping areas, departure lounges, baggage reclaim, the immigration hall, air traffic control room, even the plane itself - constitute coded space or code/space. Coded space is a space that uses software in its production, but where code is not essential to its production (code simply makes the production more efficient or productive). Code/space, in contrast, is a space dependent on software for its production – without code that space will not function as intended, with processes failing as there are no manual alternatives (or the legacy ‘fall-back’ procedures are unable to handle material flows which means the process then fails due to congestion). Air travel increasingly consists of transit through code/spaces, wherein if the code ‘fails’ passage is halted. For example, if the check-in computers crash there is no other way of checking passengers in; manual check-in has been discontinued, in part, due to new security procedures. Check-in areas then are dependent on code to operate and without it they are simply waiting rooms with no hope of onward passage until the problem is resolved. In these cases, a dyadic relationship exists between software and space (hence the slash conjoining code/space) so that spatiality is the product of code, and code exists in order to produce spatiality

Consulting project for TAP´s melhoria contínua area to increase operational efficiency at Lisbon HUB

The following report is destined to shortly describe the project developed under NOVA SBE’s Management Consulting Field Labs initiative. five NOVA SBE’s students for the airline company TAP on its melhoria contínua area. The objectives were to reduce TAP’s operational irregularities Minimum Connecting Time (MCT) in approximately 15 minutes at Lisbon Airport. In order to find the solution to the mentioned challenges the team adopted a practical work approach that proved to have a final positive impact in the company, namely the implementation of recommendations for operational irregularities would sav

How Discourses Cast Airport Security Characters: A Discourse Tracing and Qualitative Analysis of Identity and Emotional Performances

abstract: Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), airport security has become an increasingly invasive, cumbersome, and expensive process. Fraught with tension and discomfort, "airport security" is a dirty phrase in the popular imagination, synonymous with long lines, unimpressive employees, and indignity. In fact, the TSA and its employees have featured as topic and punch line of news and popular culture stories. This image complicates the TSA's mission to ensure the nation's air travel safety and the ways that its officers interact with passengers. Every day, nearly two million people fly domestically in the United States. Each passenger must interact with many of the approximately 50,000 agents in airports. How employees and travelers make sense of interactions in airport security contexts can have significant implications for individual wellbeing, personal and professional relationships, and organizational policies and practices. Furthermore, the meaning making of travelers and employees is complexly connected to broad social discourses and issues of identity. In this study, I focus on the communication implications of identity and emotional performances in airport security in light of discourses at macro, meso, and micro levels. Using discourse tracing (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009), I construct the historical and discursive landscape of airport security, and via participant observation and various types of interviews, demonstrate how officers and passengers develop and perform identity, and the resulting interactional consequences. My analysis suggests that passengers and Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) perform three main types of identities in airport security contexts--what I call Stereotypical, Ideal, and Mindful--which reflect different types and levels of discourse. Identity performances are intricately related to emotional processes and occur dynamically, in relation to the identity and emotional performances of others. Theoretical implications direct attention to the ways that identity and emotional performances structure interactions, cause burdensome emotion management, and present organizational actors with tension, contradiction, and paradox to manage. Practical implications suggest consideration of passenger and TSO emotional wellbeing, policy framing, passenger agency, and preferred identities. Methodologically, this dissertation offers insight into discourse tracing and challenges of embodied "undercover" research in public spaces.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Communication Studies 201

Airport master plan update: Manchester- Boston regional airport, Manchester, New Hampshire

Draft appendices to the update for the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport master plan, assessing zoning area, flight and terminal data