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The WalkerClark law firm in the US published on its web-site an interesting comment on the Boeing 787 debacle. "The February 4, 2013, issue of the New Yorker includes a short piece on current problems with the Boeing Dreamliner. It should be at the top of the reading list for every law firm managing partner who is considering the risks and opportunities of legal process outsourcing. James Surewiecki describes how Boeing’s decision to outsource design and production of an unprecedented percentage of the Boeing 787 aircraft, combined with a “build twice, check once” attitude about FAA certifications, produced risks that could have been easily avoided."

The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy, and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.”

According to the latest US Pew Research Global Attitudes project, the European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in disrepute across much of Europe. It's survival is often nowadays summarised by a sequence of unions. Monetary union is judged to be unsustainable without fiscal union. Fiscal union requires banking union and economic union. And to top it all off, the icing on the cake has to be political union. But what exactly is political union? And can it work.

The Guardian, the British news organisation that first reported existence of the U.S. snooping program on Thursday, noted in an editorial that its report appeared on June 6, the anniversary of D-Day in 1944 — the beginning of the end of Hitler’s police state. “The young Americans who fought their way up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from a tyranny,” the Guardian wrote. “They did not think that they were making it safe for their own rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants.”

After more than 70 tests, Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson pulled the model airplane with the 55-inch wingspan out of the wind tunnel at the University of Michigan for the final time. It was 1933, and the 23-year-old aviation engineering wunderkind had sensed months earlier that there was a problem with the design of the sleek plane. Now he had proof he could share with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation engineering team in Burbank, Calif. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. A student from Texas has invented a plastic pistol that anyone can make with a 3-D printer - not exactly an "aviation advance, however....."

n the quest for (some) transparency in defence spending, a new US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report provides a brief 2 page overview of 86 such programmes. For Airbus, the A350 XWB presents a wealth of opportunity, since the plane was designed to compete directly with both the 787 Dreamliner and Boeing's 777 and 777-X.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques program screens passengers by observing their behaviour to detect potential high-risk travellers. The program’s Behaviour Detection Officers detect passenger behaviours indicative of stress, fear, or deception. Since the program’s inception in Fiscal Year 2007, TSA data indicate that the program has expended an estimated $878 million and has more than 2,800 full-time equivalent positions, as of September 30, 2012. Despite the program’s growth, TSA has not implemented a strategic plan ensuring the program’s success.

In response to what the US Global Air Cargo Advisory Group (GACAG) considers as "recent significant increases in the number of countries seeking to implement new security measures", the members of GACAG have published a press release and a position paper. The Group is concerned that "a non-uniform approach to the implementation of requirements for new security measures could result in added bureaucracy, additional costs, and unintended nom-compliance in the aviation sector"

The operators of a global currency exchange ran a $6 billion money-laundering operation online, a central hub for criminals trafficking in everything from stolen identities to child pornography, federal prosecutors in New York said on Tuesday. The currency exchange, Liberty Reserve, operated beyond the traditional confines of United States and international banking regulations in what prosecutors called a shadowy netherworld of cyberfinance. It traded in virtual currency and provided the kind of anonymous and easily accessible banking infrastructure increasingly sought by criminal networks, law enforcement officials said.

President Barack Obama’s speech last Thursday at the National Defense University (NDU) may turn out to be the most significant of his tenure. This was only the second speech the president has devoted to national security since he took office. After four years of failing to make much progress toward closing Guantánamo, while increasingly relying on a drone war whose legality has often been questioned, Obama might have chosen to speak more cautiously in his NDU speech. Instead, he went much further, outlining a way out of this “perpetual war,” saying that “our democracy demands it.” Whether he can make good on this promise will very likely define his legacy.

This newsletter address a number of issues related to EU Border Control. Many EU nationals are "enjoying" the new EU Passports with electronic Chips and the related EU Automated Border Control (ABC) kiosks. However, all may may not be well in the implementations to date. In the UK, the elapsed time for each check, and the very small numbers of electronic kiosks resuts in each entry in to the UK requiring an on the spot decision - should I go into the "manual" line or the ABC kiosk line?.

" . . . . .By their nature, global risks do not respect national borders, as highlighted in this report. And we now know that extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change will not limit their effects to countries that are major greenhouse gas emitters; false information posted on social networks can spread like wildfire to the other side of the globe in a matter of milliseconds; and genes that make bacteria resistant to our strongest antibiotics can hitch a ride with patients on an intercontinental flight. . . . ." From the introduction to the 2013 World Economic Forum ( WEF) Global Risk Report 2013.

TSA acquisition programs represent billions of dollars in life cycle costs and support a range of aviation security programs, including technologies used to screen passengers and checked baggage. Within DHS, TSA is responsible for establishing requirements for testing and deploying transportation system technologies. Since 2010, GAO has reported that DHS and TSA faced challenges in managing acquisition efforts, including deploying technologies that did not meet requirements and were not appropriately tested and evaluated

Surprisingly, the terror threat posed by al Qaeda and other terror groups did not top this year's version of the Worldwide Threat Assessment prepared by the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI). "Senior personnel losses in 2012, amplifying losses and setbacks since 2008, have degraded core al Qaeda to a point that the group is probably unable to carry out complex, large-scale attacks in the West," said Clapper. Those losses have come from the CIA's controversial drone strike program in Pakistan's tribal areas where al Qaeda leaders are believed to continue to operate.

Can private life exist in the digital age? is an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report, sponsored by Beazley Insurance. It examines consumer attitudes to the sharing and storage of personal data online as well as the implications for companies. The report draws on two main sources for its research and findings A global survey of 758 adult Internet users conducted in January and February 2013. Almost all of the respondents (97%) use the Internet daily.

Following on from our previous newsletter, we present a McKinsey & Co article exploring the new economic and managerial challenges that confront defines ministries and industry contractors on a shifting global-security landscape The United States is winding down two wars, NATO is slashing budgets, and violent conflicts continue to erupt in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

"Five years into the financial and economic crisis in Europe, and there is still an elephant in Brussels that few are talking about". The elephant is the role of military spending in causing and perpetuating the economic crisis. As social infrastructure is being slashed, spending on weapon systems is hardly being reduced. While pensions and wages have been cut, the arms industry continues to profit from new orders as well as outstanding debts.

Regretfully topical in the wake of the recent Boston Marathon tragedy the US Government Accountability Office has published a report entitled "Information Sharing - Additional Actions Could Help Ensure That Efforts to Share Terrorism-Related Suspicious Activity Reports Are Effective" A related article and still to be judged article comments that "Mr Obama’s re-election and his support for immigration reform and gun-control legislation, however ill-fated, have enraged the US extremist fringe.

In September 2011, The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that, overall, FAA did a good job following its certification processes in assessing the composite fuselage and wings of Boeing's 787 against its airworthiness standards. However, a new GAO report has indicated that the approval process--referred to as certification--presents challenges for FAA in terms of resources and maintaining up-to-date knowledge of industry practices, and identified two issues that may hinder FAA's efforts to conduct certifications in an efficient and timely manner.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to examine airport-centric development and the activities of airport operators and regional stakeholders to facilitate such development. In an effort to increase airports' efficiency in moving passengers and cargo while bolstering the economies of regions surrounding airports, some airport operators, government officials, and business owners are exploring opportunities to strategically develop airports and the regions around them. This report describes the factors considered and actions taken by airport operators, government officials, developers, and others to facilitate airport-centric development.

With UK Royal Air Force pilots beginning test flights of the new Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet in the US (UK is acquiring a vertical takeoff version) the huge cost of this programme again raises the question - with the emergence of the ubiquitous Drone, are these aircraft really required?

Boeing’s grounded 787s moved closer to resuming flight just before the Easter break when the US FAA Approved Boeing's plan to redesign and certify the plane’s lithium-ion batteries to reduce fire risks. Two 787 aircraft will do the flight tests.

This newsletter looks at two health issues that have also impacted aviation and travel. Although the first – Antibiotic-resistant bacteria – is less related to travel today, the 2003 SARS outbreak, which was successfully contained, initially was a “travel related” scare.

Since 2002, the NYPD embarked on a covert domestic surveillance program that monitored American Muslims throughout the Northeast, from spying on neighborhood cafes and places of worship to infiltrating student whitewater-rafting trips – a program that continued despite the NYPD’s own acknowledgment that, over the course of six years, these efforts had not generated a single lead

'By the time US combat troops left Iraq at the end of 2011, 4,487 US military personnel had died. In comparison, Iraq Body Count conservatively estimates that between 110,110 and 120,293 Iraqi civilians died violent deaths between the invasion and November 2012....By September 2012, US $212 billion of US and Iraqi government money had been allocated for postwar reconstruction of the Iraqi state.'

“The lesson most Americans seem to have drawn from Iraq is “never fight a land war in Asia.” This advice was first given by Douglas MacArthur to President Kennedy in 1961. It was reiterated two years ago by then Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. Another version of this lesson is contained in the Obama administration's official defense guidance, which directs that the United States no longer size its military for large-scale stability operations”

Pure cocaine costs €1,300 ($1,700) a kilo in Putumayo, more than €4,000 at the Colombian border and, in nearby Jamaica, the price already approaches €6,000. The drug gets really expensive when it reaches Europe or the United States, where dealers make about €30,000 a kilo, depending on market conditions. The going rate in Germany is about €100 for a gram of impure cocaine, while a kilo of pure cocaine can cost up to €400,000. After 40 years of a failed war on drugs, many politicians and experts are started to embrace this same conclusion - and calling for regulated legalisation.

New details about the fire aboard the B787 have been disclosed in a preliminary report from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that provides the most comprehensive picture so far of the battery fire in the 787 that was parked at an airport and burst into flame on Jan. 7

On January 31, 2013, the United States and the European Union completed implementation of the mutual recognition arrangement for their respective supply chain security programs. The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) program is now considered the security program equivalent of Europe’s Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) program, and vice versa.

Belgian police are searching for eight masked gunmen who took less than five minutes to pull off one of the most spectacular diamond heists in recent years, stealing precious stones worth about £30m (US$50m) from the hold of a Swiss-bound plane on a Brussels runway. The men, who were armed with machine guns and dressed in police uniforms, broke through a hole they had made in the airport security fence in two vehicles a Mercedes van and a car, and they made straight for a Swiss passenger plane operated by Helvetic Airways.

The US Constitution has long recognized that unilateral executive action may be necessary in “exigent circumstances,” as long as it is followed by ex post judicial review. A US citizen and radical Islamist Anwar al-Awlaki was reportedly on a US Government “Kill List” for more than a year before he was killed With that kind of time frame, there is no logistical reason why independent judicial review could not have taken place.

A US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report has been published of a study of alternative means of collecting airport passenger facility charges (PFCs) that would allow such charges to be excluded from the ticket price

Maintaining the Retail Supply Chain is a key objective of the international air cargo industry. Before we can effectively address the security of the air cargo supply chain vis a vis the retail industry, we must first understand its requirements and imperatives.

Americans are great and heedless adopters of new technologies, and few technologies are as seductive, promise so much at so little political and financial and human cost, as drones. They give us tremendous new powers, and they seem to ask very little of us in return. President Obama captured the singular quality of drone warfare precisely in a remark that appears in Mark Bowden's recent book The Finish. "There's a remoteness to it," he said

Throughout 2012, concerns have remained about external threats to supply chains (such as natural disasters and demand shocks) and systemic vulnerabilities (such as oil dependence and information fragmentation). Additionally, growing concern around cyber risk, rising insurance and trade finance costs are leading supply chain experts to explore new mitigation options. Accenture research indicates that more than 80% of companies are now concerned about supply chain resilience.

A new Stockholm International Piece Research Institute (SIPRI) report entitled “Transfers of small arms and light weapons to fragile States: strengthening oversight and control ” finds that the challenge for the international community is to ensure that fragile states receive the arms that they require, while limiting the negative impacts on conflict dynamics, stabilisation efforts and governance

This issue of the Newsletter contains a number of articles on airports. We compare the integrated approach to airports and airlines in Singapore and Dubai with the highly publicised difficulties facing airlines and railway terminals in Germany. On the one side we have the article entitled "From hub to tourist destination ­ An explorative study of Singapore and Dubai¹s aviation-based transformation"

In an imagined four-part conversation with Christopher Bellavita a number of participants explore the meaning of “theory,” the extent to which homeland security draws on theories from other disciplines, and how having a single theory might (or might not) strengthen the academic discipline.

The European Commission released a communication to the European Parliament, Council, and Economic and Social Committee concerning its findings relating to customs risk management and security of the supply chain. This report identifies gaps under the current system that require “urgent action” concerning data quality, supply chain modelling, and certain aspects of the methodology applied