With a quicker return of passengers than anticipated ✈️, there have been disproportionally long queues, canceled flights and growing tensions in airports due to security staff shortages. However, the human surveillance market, fragmented and unattractive, is unable to provide enough workers in the short and medium term 🤯. Auxilia's artificial intelligence can answer this need by drastically increasing passenger’s flows, experience and safety.
In Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, fightings 🥊 have occurred last Sunday in long queues because passengers were exhausted and feared to miss their plane. In the middle of the scrum, some passengers eventually took advantage of the chaos to come over the security checks uncontrolled ⚠️ This is not an isolated case but the situation faced in numerous international airports, such as Manchester and Leed Bradford where travellers missed their flight in a climate of panic despite being 3 hours in advance ⏰
Unfortunately the worst is yet to come. In Aéroport de Paris, if the number of passengers increased during the first four month of the year compared to 2021, it only achieved 65 % of the pre-pandemic level for the same period. Thus, airports should prepare for a summer of unrests 🥵.
These difficulties are linked to a lack of personnel, particularly in the field of security, where companies are struggling to recruit after reducing the number of employees or service providers during the Covid-19 period. At the end of April, the CEO of Aéroport de Paris, Augustin de Romanet, expressed a need for 4,000 professionals, including security operators, receptionists and aviation technicians, for Charles-de-Gaulle and Paris-Orly airports alone. In addition, 1,200 staff are needed at Brussels-Zaventem airport, 10% of staff are still missing at Schiphol airport while UK airports are forced to cancel almost 1,000 flights a week.
According to Aviation Recruitment Network, Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports’ head-hunter, it would take at least a year to fill vacancies due to the poor working conditions and lengthy security checks on new recruits. Human surveillance market is uberized, subject to social dumping and the career path is not as developed as other fields such as fire security. Due to very price-sensitive clients, companies struggle to make a profit and recruit. For example, in France an hour is invoiced at around 17 euros all taxes included, 75 % of jobs are fixed-term contracts and 2/3 of workers are in a situation of social fragility.
Airports still have a long path to go through such as at Schiphol, where the direction is negotiating after a strike on the 23rd of April over the violation of a collective agreements stating that operators must work for 14 euros per hour including taxes and under a permanent employment contract.
Auxilia is able to alleviate the pressure on security agents and passengers by significantly increasing flows and reducing queues. Indeed, our artificial intelligence product AIRIS not only rises the safety by automatically detecting threats in less than 200 milliseconds, but also reduces the number of bag searches.
Today, security operator have to analyse complex images, where arms can be dismantled and hidden, without any help in the image analysis.
Our software alerts the agent when a threat is automatically detected. ✨ Therefore:
-> The analysis time of an x-ray image is reduced.
-> The conveyor belt does not need to stop or go back and forth for double checking.
-> The number of unnecessary searches is reduced by removing doubt about the nature of the images.
-> An agent is able to process several images more easily thanks to the multiplexing system.
