The use of drones in airport security operations

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones as a widely known term, have recently been used in many areas. Aviation is one of the industries that drones are used in several services. These services consist of airport surface and infrastructure inspections, aircraft body inspections, and repair and maintenance services. Drone use in airport security operations currently is not a common practice. One of the key rea-sons of limited implementation in security is strict regulating rules in the industry. Adding a new tool or making changes in existing service methods is quite difficult thanks to restricting rules and regulations. Nevertheless, this study intends to explore how drones would improve effectiveness of airport security operations. Its goal is to create a contextualised understanding of the phe-nomena, explain behaviour and beliefs, identify processes, and understand experiences of prac-titioners regarding drones and their use in airport security. With an effort to achieve this goal, the study has faced some challenges consisting of the lack of sufficient resources and previous studies in the literature, availability of quantitative data, and difficulties with finding people who are willing to talk about details of security work. Despite the existence of these limitations, the study has generated a theoretical framework to provide an understanding on major concepts in the studied field and built up a qualitative methodological ap-proach by interviewing ten professionals from different branches and positions from aviation background. Consequently, it has created an analysis based on data gathered from the field. It has eventually come up with two major outcomes. On the one hand, the use of drones in airport security operations would be an effective solution for reducing response time, releasing man-power from routine tasks, and having an expanded vision throughout the airport perimeter. Yet, on the other hand, drones functioning in the airside would expose certain risks to overall security structure of airports with regard to interference with aircraft traffic and collision risks, connection between the drone and ground control system, information security, and cyber threats