The air cargo industry would like to see greater harmonisation of rules and regulations around air cargo scanning devices to reduce the need to have different set ups in each country.
Speaking at the World Cargo Symposium, independent aviation security consultant Jennifer Haigh said that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) had arranged a meeting of various stakeholders in Bonn to try and find some harmonisation in scanning requirements.
She said: “The large carriers have 200-300 units across the world, they are trying to meet the requirements of [various regulators].
“For the poor programme manager who is trying to manage these across the entire platform, having the ability to have just that one piece is where we are really trying to focus on getting.”
She said that progress had been made since the ICAO meeting, but standardisation was still “not moving fast enough”.
“ICAO has done a good job in kick starting it,” Haigh said. “The initiative they started a couple of years ago in Bonn has really started flowing into some other things, with the regulators putting together innovation forces, talking with manufacturers, getting us involved.
“We want to continue to have conversation between IATA and ICAO and for them to talk to regulators to really push harmonisation.”
Haigh’s views were later reflected by Nicolas Ouakli of equipment manufacturer CEIA: “We definitely need, I believe, more harmonisation with regard to the different standards. “The US, European Union, China, make sure that everybody is on the same page.
“Things can be very different from one place to another, even within the European Union, not everybody is on the same page, even though it is supposed to be a union.
“It makes it difficult for us, manufacturers, it makes it difficult for stakeholders, which have presence every where in the world.”
