In unusually candid comments, the Foreign Secretary said Egypt was one of several countries that have failed to properly train and motivate its staff to ensure the security of its airports.
"There`s a cultural problem here, and I`m not pointing the finger at the Egyptians - this is the case in a large part of the world,” Mr Hammond told reporters in Washington. "There`ll be countries in this hemisphere that suffer from it as well: the idea that security is about installing some new machines and writing up a manual."
The sentiment was shared by Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of Easy Jet. Talking to BBC, in her first interview since the crash, Ms McCall said that whilst “British airports do security very well”, Mr Hammond was “right to point out that there are other countries that airlines fly to where it perhaps needs to be tightened".
Ms McCall spent the past five days trying to help fly home thousands of British tourists who became stranded in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, after a Russian airliner that took off from the town`s airport crashed killing 224 people.
Mr Hammond said on Tuesday that preliminary investigations showed that it was now “more than likely” that a bomb had been the cause of the crash.
"You don`t need a sophisticated capability to get a small bomb, and that`s all you need to bring down an aircraft, a small bomb with a straightforward timer,” he said.
"Sadly there are many, many people who can do that. The issue is about getting it airside in an airport that is supposed to be secure. Where this points the finger is at the capability of the security on the ground at Sharm el-Sheikh."
""Britain responded to the crash by grounding flights to the UK from the Egyptian resort town. Mr Hammond told reporters on Tuesday that the decision was taken after a British security team visited Sharm el-Sheikh airport in the immiedia aftermath of the October 31 crash.
"They looked back on CCTV footage of the search areas and things over the previous couple of days," he said. "On the basis of what we saw we decided that we had to stop flying until we`d sorted out, until the Egyptians had sorted it out."
Mr Hammond said that he and other government officials involved in the decision to ground the planes had chosen to do so after asking themselves whether they would have felt safe to board a plane from Sharm el-Sheikh in the days after the crash. When they all answered "no", Mr Hammond told reporters, they knew the decision was made.
After days of confusion surrounding whether passengers would be allowed to fly back to the UK, Ms McCall said all those stranded would be home by the weekend.
"We had about 4,500 passengers in Sharm last Wednesday and brought back 1,500 of them," she said. "By the end of the weekend, we would hope to have brought back all of the delayed passengers.”
Efforts to bring tourists home have also since been complicated by the fact that - amid fears that other attacks might have been planned - passenger baggage is being searched separately and flown home by cargo jet.
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