The dramatic effects of the corona pandemic on traffic development at Frankfurt Airport, with declines of up to 90 percent, have made the images of overcrowded terminal buildings from the pre-crisis years almost forgotten.

But only almost.

At the latest since the “chaotic days” at Easter 2018, the airport operator Fraport AG has been doing everything in its power to take control of the security check processes again from the federal police.

In May, a contractual agreement was finally reached with the Federal Ministry of the Interior, according to which Fraport will be in charge of the controls from 2023, while the Federal Police will only be responsible for supervision.

Jochen Remmert

Airport editor and correspondent Rhein-Main-Süd.

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    In preparation for this takeover, the Fraport security subsidiary FraSec Fraport Security Services GmbH has fundamentally restructured.

    According to this, 3800 of the 4000 employees are divided between three subsidiaries: One of them is FraSec Luftsicherheit GmbH, in which aviation security assistants are responsible for checking people, hand luggage and checked baggage.

    The second subsidiary is FraSec Airport Security GmbH.

    Its task is to protect airport operations from attacks in accordance with the Aviation Security Act.

    Among other things, this means securing all structures and areas of the airport.

    Subsidiary number three, FraSec Service GmbH, combines all other services that are intended to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible in the terminals.

    Better processes at the airports

    A crucial point of the new structure is that FraSec subsidiaries can now enter into strategic cooperations, shares can be transferred to partners outside the group.

    According to a FraSec spokesman, this is of crucial importance, especially for FraSec aviation security.

    51 percent of this will go to a strategic partner to ensure that this FraSec subsidiary can also successfully participate in the calls for tenders for controls required by the EU.

    For reasons of competition law, no subsidiary controlled by the company placing the tender may participate in the tenders.

    However, since Fraport AG itself will tender and award contracts in the future, one hundred percent Fraport subsidiaries or granddaughters would not be able to get a chance at all.

    For the airport operator, the most important thing is to improve the processes for passengers before take-off and after landing, which have been repeatedly criticized by Frankfurt's main customer Lufthansa. The airport operator believes that it will be able to ensure this with the new agreement, because now only it decides when which control lanes are opened and when and how many security personnel are deployed where. In the future, Fraport will also determine which devices are procured and used for control purposes, one of several demands that Fraport CEO Stefan Schulte has repeatedly made in this matter.

    In recent years, Schulte has regularly criticized the previous division of responsibilities at Frankfurt Airport as being impractical and inadequate.

    His house is much better able than the federal police to optimally control processes such as security controls and thus ensure fast and convenient processes, he said.

    Fraport makes decisions

    The so much lamented distribution of responsibilities is - contrary to what one might suspect - by no means a relic from the time when the airport was not yet listed and belonged entirely to the public sector.

    The contracts on which the unsatisfactory distribution of tasks is based were only signed in 2009 between the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Fraport AG.

    Schulte was the board member for flight and terminal operations.

    The agreements stipulated that the federal government would tender the tasks of aviation security on the ground from 2010 onwards.

    Even then, the EU demanded tenders for such services, in which Fraport then also participated with its security subsidiary FraSec.

    The operational lead, however, lay with the Federal Police.

    Until then, the distribution of tasks was pretty much exactly what the airport operator vehemently demanded years later: the federal government had entrusted Fraport with the entire organization of air security in Frankfurt.

    This construction, which should ensure a particular proximity to practice, was called "the Frankfurt model".

    Experts later ruled that this model could also have met all of the EU's demands and put the necessary security services out to tender. At the time, however, the Fraport Executive Board made a different decision and transferred the control, planning and administrative tasks of aviation security to the Federal Police. At the time, critical voices warned that Fraport was thereby relinquishing central control functions and overburdening the federal police.