Podcast: Business Aviation Security Risks Amid The Israel-Iran Conflict

Subscribe Now​

Don't miss a single episode. Subscribe to Aviation Week's BCA Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Discover all of our podcasts at aviationweek.com/podcasts.

Marwan Eiwess: Thank you, Molly. I'm very happy to be here with you today.

Molly McMillin: So the weeks-long conflict between Israel and Iran escalated on June 22nd with the U.S. bombing of Iranian sites in Iran. And Iran's response on a U.S. military base in Qatar as of this taping a ceasefire that began June 24th so far appears to be holding with the hope of diplomacy, but it's certainly too soon to say what will happen in the long term. So Marwan, you've kind of been advising people. Tell us what you do with MedAire and what you've been doing in the last few weeks. You've been a very busy person.

Marwan Eiwess: Indeed, Molly. We have been very busy in the last two to three weeks. What we try to do as MedAire security, we try to provide our clients with aviation security recommendations, expert advice to support, inform decision-making and ensure smooth operational continuity. So what we do is we scan, we try to understand what's happening in terms of aviation security. We digest those information and we provide our client with the best recommendation we have.

Molly McMillin: So when all this started between Iran and Israel, can you tell us how things started and then how it escalated and kind of where it's at today? What were you doing?

Marwan Eiwess: Yes, of course. So what we trying to do is, so the situation is very volatile and already we had a sense of information that we expected things to escalate to a certain extent. So what we do is we try to understand the situation on ground and then we try to understand on how that would have consequences on the aviation sector. So we try to understand airspace closure missile launches, the talk of ceasefire. So it's a lot of background. I would say background study to understand the globality of the conflict. Now at MedAire we've been closely monitoring the events around the clock. It's a 24/7 operation work and we try to provide timely, accurate insight and guidance to the client as well. We've been working with the wider group, so our colleagues across the different region to try to understand what is happening, but most importantly anticipate what come next. And I think this is what's very important for our client to try to understand where are we going with this conflict. And this will allow us to offer the clients with different type of scenario to help them plan proactively, whether it's for their people, their flight or their operations.

Molly McMillin: So Marwan, at one point you had mentioned ahead of the call that you all were doing evacuations and planning evacuations and repatriations. How many did you do and where were you? Where were people going or coming from?

Marwan Eiwess: Yes, indeed. As part of the broader group response, evacuation four had been coordinated were necessary MedAire particularly we have been advising on aviation security including exit route airspace closure, providing assessment of alternative flights and the help of operator to navigate the risk. Now as a wider group, to give you a sense of the scale, we had supported about 630 assistance calls from 250 clients and this include 110 aviation related. More than 390 people were evacuated by land, air, and sea. And we issue about 260 security advisories and alerts. And this happened within the 10 days of escalation only.

Molly McMillin: Wow. And so where were they being evacuated from? Were they in Iran and Iraq or where were they located?

Marwan Eiwess: Different location across the Middle East, not necessarily only those two countries, but more broadly are across the Middle East. Because of short notice airspace closure, some clients wanted their people to be out of certain country and some repatriation to let's say a more stable country nearby or sometimes back to their home country when possible. The last feedback I was reading today was from one of our clients, if I can read it to you maybe. So the client testimonial went and said we wanted to send a note of our sincere appreciation, the assistant center operation team for the excellent and seamless support to repatriate our colleagues. So this is a statement from one of our client that speaks a lot on what we do on day-to-day because doing all this background work and providing the support to our client, we tend to forget those successful stories because for us it is a day operation that continues tomorrow and the day after. And having those statements from my client is really and truly powerful.

Molly McMillin: Well, I'm sure they were happy to have you in this kind of a volatile situation. What about GPS interference and spoofing incidents? Have you heard reports that those incidents have risen? What are you advising your clients to do?

Marwan Eiwess: That's a very good question, Molly, because this is indeed one of the aviation security risk that had increased in the recent years. And all this is due different variables to take into consideration, but we know for a fact that region with more military conflicts have erase on the GPS jamming or sometime even GPS spoofing. If I can summarize very quickly, we have two different risk here, the GPS jamming which block the signal, so your device cannot get a location or the GPS spoofing that fakes the signals to make your device think it's somewhere else. So we have different type of threat here in terms of to counter that my best advice will be to plan properly the flight route and the understanding of where the geolocalization location of those GPS are happening, the GPS interference are happening to try to mitigate this risk as much as possible. So it's a lot of pre-flight operational brief that are needed to try to counter this the best we can.

Molly McMillin: That would be a scary situation. It would seem to be,

Marwan Eiwess: Of course, yes. But today, and if I may add in today, world Operation Aviation Operation world, we do understand that this is happening and we are equipped to mitigate it the best way possible. It's not something that we're not aware about if I may say. So. The fact that we know, we understand on what could be done to a certain extent and things are evolving and the most important is to be on top of those events to try to really understand the risk and how it's concluded, if I may say.

Molly McMillin: Right. It seemed like I was watching the ops group and S'S conflict zone information bulletins and it seemed like things were changing hourly, daily, but at some points several times a day. And it seems like that must have been a lot to keep up with.

Marwan Eiwess: Yes, absolutely indeed. The environment is very volatile. Every day there could be a change and we need to be on top of this change. As we say, we're 24/7 and it's very important for operators within this region to plan properly. It's essential for them to have access to update timely information, reliable security intelligence to conduct a good risk assessment to ensure they clearly define their organization risk tolerance level. And it's very important to have a 24/7 tool that inform about political and security information. And those critical elements will allow the operator to make an informed go no-go decision to this destinations because what's real today might not be tomorrow.

Molly McMillin: That's good advice. Real quickly, I was reading that some of the corridors where people were to avoid the closed airspace and that were getting very crowded, very busy and there were delays in getting slot times. What did you see there?

Marwan Eiwess: So indeed this is something in the aviation world as well. We are quite familiar, I would say in a certain way because as soon as an airspace closure happened, the operation tried to reroute to a certain destination. Now, this region of the world, the Middle East is very important. It's an important region to go from east to west or from west to east. So as soon as certain areas are closed or restricted, very quickly we need to find the rerouting that will make sense for operation. Now when I say that we have seen in this recent conflict that the reroute that happened made a lot of those routes congested and an increase in the use of those routes, which was expected, but it's very important for the clients, for operators to understand what are the plan A, the plan B, and sometime even the plan C need to be there. If I may add as well, this shifted a lot of the operation in the aviation world. Why? Because the reroute means that there will be longer route flights, more fuel cost as well, war risk premium have spiked providing some a question mark for operator if they really need to operate there and if they do at which cost. So the impact is more significant from a security incident. Now we are adding operational environmental cost and crew pressures. So it's what I call personally a domino effect.

Molly McMillin: Well, and so going forward, I know it remains a volatile situation. Are things though in the meantime kind of back to normal? I mean I know that EASA is still recommending against flights in the airspace of Iran, Iraq, Israel and Jordan that says the advice for Lebanon's been eased a little. But other than those areas, is it easing up what is the case today?

Marwan Eiwess: Yes, absolutely. You are correct. So this volatile environment, we can say that there were a lot of changes in the last few days or in the last two weeks, let's say. We did witness some, as we discussed, some operations cancellation from some operators. We have seen some airspace closure as well. But those disruptions were brief. And even from a BGA perspective, we saw an increase in operation in bordering area, bordering conflict area, and sometime for repatriation task as well. Now the fragility of the ceasefire is something we are monitoring around the clock and the reemergence of a risk is possible on short or no notice. Indeed today things have been back to a normal operation to a certain extent there is operation going on very briefly when ceasefire, when there were the discussion of the ceasefire, we could see already and we witnessed a lot of operation resuming to what it used to be prior, the escalation, which are good sign and positive sign of operation going back to normal. But is it the final? I would not say that too fast. We need to monitor, we need to understand it is positive, but it's still fragile and we need to understand if this will continue in the next few weeks. So my best advice for operator at this stage, it's still to conduct thorough risk assessment of the situation.

Molly McMillin: That sounds like great advice. Anything else you'd like to add or say Marwan before we wrap up?

Marwan Eiwess: Today? In the aviation world, it's very important to keep ourself, and I know we emphasize on that during our discussion, Molly, but it's very important for operators to be really focused on timely and updated information, security, political information to understand the whole context on ground to be able to transfer it to the aviation security world. And I would say that for us as MedAire is something we try our best to provide those recommendation, we try sometime to tailor recommendation and advice based on our client need to operate or risk appetite as well. And with the wider group is something we have successfully done in the last few years. And we're always happy to support operation within the region and also globally because something I need to mention as well is MedAire Security. We provide security advice, recommendation for global operation around the world. Meaning that today the focus is very much on the Middle East because of the recent escalation, but we do similar kind of project recommendation and task across the globe.

Molly McMillin: Great. Well that's all the time we have for today. I'm so glad you joined us, Marwan. And thank you to Jeremy Kariuki, our podcast producer for producing this edition. And thank you all for listening.

Jeremy Kariuki: Thanks for listening to the BCA podcast by Aviation Week Network. This week's episode was produced by Jeremy Kariuki. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to subscribe or follow us on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to support us, please leave a rating wherever you listen. Thanks again and we'll see you next time.