Large numbers of people pass through airports every day. We get annoyed by security measures every time we fly, but how does it look from the other side?
Airport Contraband gives you the opportunity to see the business end from the point of view of security personal working on airports. You will assume different roles on different types of airports in your career and try your hands at keeping the airport safe, look for contraband, spot suspicious passengers, perform checks or inspect entire aircrafts.

It is incredible what passengers sometimes try to get on a plane and we are not talking the usual items one might quickly forget not being allowed on a plane. While you’ll have to deal with those as well, we are talking real contraband and some serious smuggling. Weapons, drugs, counterfeit currencies in obscene quantities, bomb making materials and dangerous chemicals just to name a few. Some attempts are very crude, some highly sophisticated while others downright comical.
There is also a big difference between passengers traveling via commercial airlines and ones using private airplanes. Inspecting an entire plane takes the cat and mouse game of smuggling to a whole new level. A small private propeller plane offers plenty of places to hide things and it doesn’t get any easier with a private jet. Thankfully you will have an impressive array of tools at your disposal to aid you in these efforts.

COVID-19 only brought to a wider attention a topic that has been of major concern for decades: epidemics and pandemics. Airports play a major role in both and are more and more required to act accordingly. The game will reflect this development by introducing epidemic and pandemic events and put you in charge to deal with them without creating chaos. Quarantine requirements, cancelled flights, angry passengers and increasing demand on the airport’s infrastructure due to more passengers as a consequence of cancelled flights will put quite some pressure on you to deal with.

Checking luggage is one thing, checking the passengers themselves is another. Passport checks sound like an easy enough job, but it actually becomes difficult the moment suspicion arises. While you pay attention to clues in a passenger’s behavior and are aided by a system feeding you additional information about previous offenses, you can’t just pull a passenger to the side on a whim. Well, you can, but every time you are wrong and an innocent passenger misses a flight you get a penalty. Do it frequently and your career will slowly go down the drain. On the other hand if you miss a guilty passenger that is up to no good, your career ends even faster.

Passengers queueing up for departure or arriving is not all that happens around an airport. There is a lot more to maintaining airport-wide security. And it all starts with monitoring different areas of the airport, looking for what’s going on, trying to spot known suspects and mark all types of suspicious behaviors for your colleagues to follow up upon.
Having a multitude of cameras and a dozen screens at your disposal allows you get to oversee the vast expanse of the airport. When you advance to a modern US airport that us. Starting your career on a tiny airport in South America there is no surveillance system and you have to deal with security the old fashioned way: walk the beat.

Many of the tasks you’ll have to perform might appear quite easy at first. Don’t let this appearance fool you. Even the simplest of tasks might become challenging when time matters and it usually does. On an airport everything is on a tight schedule. You will have to perform your duties with predefined timeframes in mind, otherwise you not only miss out on commendations, but are likely to gather penalties that will hamper your progress and career.

Airport Contraband features a career mode where you start at a tiny local airport in the middle of nowhere in South America and advance up to a large modern airport in the US. It is the career and the different environments that provide a great deal of variety. Even the same tasks are handles differently on different airports. Someone tries to smuggle some drugs at a modern airport he gets arrested immediately and the product gets ceased. The same situation in South America may end up differently with a threat of violence or the culprits trying to bribe their way out of trouble…
While similar situations already play out differently between the airport, what happens during an epidemic or pandemic event brings the differences to an entirely different level. You won’t have much in terms of quarantine capabilities or medial on call on the tiny strip and you’ll have to improvise.

Contraband is by far not the only crime committed on airports. You will also have to deal with lots of minor violations, theft, impersonation, vandalism or assault to just name a few.
Your job won’t be chasing criminals (although that might actually happen on occasion), it’s more about discovering those crimes and coordinating the security personal to follow your directions.

You don’t always work on your own. As various tasks have to be dealt with quickly, you are occasionally aided by NPCs. They have different skill and experience levels and also feature different personalities. Who you get to work with depends mostly on your reputation and progress in the game. Some you will get along just fine, others might be a little more tricky not to mention some might even break under the pressure.
If you have a rather poor track record, the experienced NPCs will do their best to avoid teaming up with you. However, when you excel at your duties and gain some commendations, you’ll be able to influence who you team up with.