Security risk management in the aviation turnaround sector

Security in the airline industry receives heightened attention due to an increase of diverse attacks, many being driven by information technology. Ongoing research does not take into account the sociotechnical nature of security in critical domains such as airline turnaround systems. To cut time and costs, the latter comprises several companies for ticket- and luggage management, maintenance checks, cleaning, passenger transportation, re-fueling, and so on. The airline industry has adopted extensively information technology for assuring an incoming airplane is in a state to take off again as quickly as possible. Increasingly, this leads to the emergence of a virtual enterprise that uses information technologies to seamlessly integrate respective airline-turnaround processes into one composition. The resulting sociotechnical security risk management issues are not well understood and require diligent investigation. This paper fills the gap with an evaluation about the application of a security risk management method to identify critical business- and information-technology assets for a deeper risk mitigation analysis. The results of this paper yield insights about the utility of existing security risk management approach.