Airports must adapt security as drone and missile risks grow, experts say at Dubai show

Industry experts have warned that airports are being compelled to reassess their passenger protection and flight continuity strategies as missile and drone attacks pose an increasingly grave threat to civilian aviation.

Repeated assaults by Houthi rebels in Saudi Arabia, along with months of disruption stemming from the war in Iran, have laid bare the vulnerability of airports to contemporary warfare and the challenge of sustaining operations during extended security crises.

Growing threats to civil aviation

Leaders from the aviation sector gathered at the Dubai Airport Show on Monday said airports are investing in new technology and contingency planning to withstand threats ranging from military strikes to cyber attacks, while acknowledging that no facility can ever be fully secure.

Tim Walder, chairman of the British Aviation Group, said the evolving nature of global conflicts has created unprecedented challenges for airport operators.

“What we’re seeing today is a completely different set of challenges being faced geopolitically,” he said. “Resilience isn’t something that’s 100 per cent, it’s always going to fail on occasions, but we learn faster.”

“The key thing is the airport can be a leader in terms of understanding where the threats can come from, such as cybersecurity and climate change,” Mr Walder added.

Technology and resilience

Mr Walder, whose company provides expertise on meeting the challenges of the global aviation industry, said supporting passengers during a crisis is critical to retaining confidence.

“If something goes down, you lose passenger confidence and you can lose that for a long time,” he said. “Cyber-attacks are obviously high up there when talking about risk and we are seeing different levels of that.”

“A few months ago in the UK and Europe, hackers attacked the software that supports the check-in process and that impacted a number of airports in Europe, including London and Brussels,” Mr Walder said. “These attacks aren’t going to be just necessarily hitting an individual airport or airline, they’re going to hit a network. The question is how do we make the network more resilient as well.”

Critical Gulf transit hubs and other major infrastructure are increasingly integrating site security with dedicated anti-drone and air defence measures to improve protection at airports.

International gateways to the region have enhanced perimeter screening and police patrols near airports, while others have implemented terminal entry checkpoints in response to elevated threat levels in the Middle East.

Counter-drone measures

Exhibitors at Dubai World Trade Centre displayed the latest countermeasures and demonstrated how drone technology is rapidly advancing to help secure airspace.

Udi Lowy, sales director for the Gulf Co-operation Council and India at D-Fend Solutions, said his company’s EnforceAir Plus system is capable of taking over unidentified drones and bringing them under control.

“Drones are quite a new threat in the world, so most of the technologies just adopt [existing] air-defence mechanisms for drones,” he said. “We are using cyber systems that detect the communication of the drone and we have the ability to retract the relevant information from the drone itself.”

Rather than jamming a drone’s signal to bring it down, potentially causing damage or injuries on the ground, the EnforceAir Plus system takes over its controls and lands it safely nearby. It can then verify from where the drone was deployed and by whom.

Mr Lowy said the system can even be programmed to deal with a swarm attacking airspace simultaneously.

“Sometimes, a kid can fly a drone and create mayhem. Rather than jamming all signals, we cherry-pick the signal we want to interfere with and actually take the drone itself. We don’t interfere with any other signal, so there is no interference with airplanes,” he said.

The UAE’s Ministry of Defence has reported a total of 2,265 drone attacks on the country since 28 February, when the Iran war broke out, with Dubai International Airport handling 111 aerial threat alerts.

Crisis management at airports

Future airport developments, including the expansion of Al Maktoum International Airport, will feature blast-proof designs and hardened concrete shells to bolster defences against aerial attacks.

Speaking on a panel at the Dubai Airport Show on operational resilience under pressure, Binu Gopal, chief operating officer at Ras Al Khaimah International Airport, said the priority in a crisis is to maintain operations as safely and efficiently as possible.

“We prepare for multiple kinds of disruption which may occur at the airport,” he said. “Resilience is the ability to continue our operations even when we face some kind of disruption, maintain critical activities and respond to the disturbance, and get back to normal safely and efficiently.”

“This cuts across the entire ecosystem, be it set operations, terminal operations, airlines, ground-handling operations, customs and immigration. However, during a crisis, it becomes more and more interdependent. For us it is not about having a contingency plan, it’s about how well we are able to respond as a team,” Mr Gopal said.