Streamlined Airport Security Takes Flight with Safety Reimagined
Businesses across a range of industries faced massive financial losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but few suffered as much as Canada’s aviation industry. Restrictions on air travel and strict health and safety protocols caused passenger volumes to drop by 85%. The country’s largest airport, Toronto Pearson International Airport, lost $383 million in 2020 and another $302.8 million in the first nine months of 2021. Fast forward to the summer of 2022, and Canadian Airports are experiencing some of the longest delays in the world. Staffing shortages, cancelled flights, and disgruntled passengers also impact the industry’s bottom line.
Safety and security are a vital part of airport operations, and job action by security staff across Canada is yet another hit to the industry. Airports have unique security challenges, and a significant security incident could shut down the whole facility, a major blow to a struggling industry.
Leveraging existing Motorola two-way radios already in use by airport staff, Safety Reimagined enables airports to save time and money by limiting investments into new resources and streamlining the incident response process, which saves time and boosts productivity.
The blog examines how Motorola’s Safety Reimagined ecosystem can help simplify airport security when the industry needs it most.
What is Safety Reimagined?
Safety Reimagined from Motorola is the first and only end-to-end enterprise technology ecosystem that unifies voice, video, data, and analytics on a single platform, providing your organization with tools to address the everyday challenges hindering productivity, all while improving safety. Safety Reimagined is built on the concept that the technologies that keep your staff and organization safe can also improve efficiency by eliminating silos.
Safety Reimagined offers the following solutions to common challenges faced by the aviation industry:
- A streamlined safety and security solution that enables organizations to do more with less investment in resources
- An integrated system that seamlessly transfers data across the full suite of software and devices
- Real-time monitoring and complete situational awareness for faster and proactive incident response times
- Workflows and software solutions that can be customized to meet the needs of your organization
Safety Reimagined Components
Monitoring a large facility like an airport can be daunting. It involves controlling multiple entries, securing protected areas, and ensuring the safety of staff and passengers.
The Safety Reimagined ecosystem is built on the following four components to better secure airports:
- Detect: Safety Reimagined combines video security, access control, and artificial intelligence to give you an in-depth view of your facility within a single intuitive interface.
- Analyze: Appearance search capabilities allow security staff to locate persons or vehicles of interest quickly, and video analytics can detect potentially dangerous activity in real-time.
- Communicate: Motorola’s industry-leading radios with multimedia capabilities keep your staff in constant contact, allowing staff to share more information to resolve incidents faster. Automatic alerts can keep your entire team informed in real-time.
- Respond: Incident management capabilities allow staff to log reports easily. Video footage can be linked to these reports, making them more valuable and informative when planning future incident responses.
Save Time and Resources at Airports with Safety Reimagined
On the long road to financial recovery, airports can benefit from a new approach to safety that enables security staff to proactively respond to incidents and leverage equipment they are already using.
Here are just a few examples to illustrate how Safety Reimagined can help improve airport security:
- Monitor who is accessing restricted areas and instantly alert staff when someone accesses a restricted site without an access code or swipe card
- Detect someone climbing a fence, populate footage from nearby cameras to see where the person is headed, and use appearance search to locate them faster
- Thermal cameras can automatically detect a passenger with an elevated temperature
Let’s take an in-depth look at how the four components of Safety Reimagined can help airports improve their security processes with less investment into new equipment and better allocation of security staff resources.
Step 1: Detect
The first step in keeping an airport safe is proactively monitoring security threats. Access control software allows airports to manage who has access to different areas of the facility. This software can assign access to different areas in a facility using a role-based system. Video cameras and analytics software integrate with access control software, giving security staff full situational awareness and providing them with the tools they need to respond quickly to emerging incidents.
Access control, video security, and analytics work together to produce the following outcomes:
- Security staff can receive instant notifications via text message and text-to-voice alerts on both two-way radios and smartphones when a restricted area has been breached
- Analytics technology works with wide-view cameras to detect events such as vehicles driving in the wrong direction
- Use license plate recognition and facial recognition for a full view of who is entering the airport grounds
- Give security staff visibility into incidents to help them respond appropriately by using fixed and body-worn camera footage.
Step 2: Analyze
After a security breach has been detected, security staff can leverage analytics technology to get a better picture of the incident before they respond. Appearance search helps staff locate persons of interest faster. Command Central software uses real-time video, GPS location tracking, and radio communications to give security staff the information they need to respond appropriately while using fewer resources.
The technology used in this stage allows security staff to:
- Determine the exact location of persons of interest and locate them faster using appearance search technology
- Automatically gather footage from surrounding cameras if a person is moving around the facility
- Locate the closest security officer to respond using GPS data, reducing response time
- Aggregate footage from multiple cameras on a single screen
Step 3: Communicate
Fast and reliable communication is critical when dealing with security incidents. Radio communications can keep different teams across the facility connected at all times. Innovative radio features like mass notifications, push-to-talk, and multimedia capabilities allow both voice and data to be transmitted, to keep teams informed. MOTOTRBO Ion and Wave PTX radios have multimedia features that enable staff to view, stream, and send video footage. The Ion allows security staff to view images and videos on a high-res touch screen. The Avtec Scout software modernizes the dispatch process. It integrates with the two-way radios, broadband push-to-talk, telephony, AUX input/output, and IP voice devices that your team is already using.
Communication technology makes it possible to:
- Easily share voice, text, multimedia messages, live video streams, and deliver emergency alters to staff across multiple devices
- Provide security teams with the intelligence they need to respond to incidents promptly and efficiently
- Expedite the dispatch process through a single desktop app
Step 4: Respond
The intelligence gathered in the communication stage allows staff to respond to incidents before they escalate, which maximizes productivity, keeping staff and passengers safe. Motorola Ally software simplifies record management across devices thanks to its customizable fields and the ability to attach multimedia files. The Critical Connect app can temporarily disable communication links in an emergency.
The technology used in the response stage can:
- Enable security staff to communicate with first responders over radios networks
- Easily gather video and photo evidence to supply to police
- Automatically capture incident data for reports
Learn More
ROCK Networks can guide airports through the process of adopting Safety Reimagined. We can help customize a solution to meet the unique needs of your facility. You can adopt what you need now and add other features as your requirements evolve. Download the Safety Reimagined brochure now to learn how Safety Reimagined can help streamline security operations.
