Originally Posted by
slip and turn
And what is the story thesedays in EU regarding inbound and outbound contamination between passengers? One airport I use very regularly has it happening by design in a long corridor adjacent to the apron all airside of passport control. The only thing stopping FR inbound pax turning on their heel and flying back is the lack of a boarding pass to show cabin crew at the top of the aircraft steps, and they could even bypass that if they had conspired with an outbound passenger and either swapped places or displayed the outbound passenger's boarding pass on a second phone.
There is no story. Passengers from the UK are considered sterile, and end up in the sterile non-schengen area at airports that have that (some airports don't have a sterile non-schengen area so you end up in the non-sterile area, which is a pain - some don't have enough gates in the sterile area so likewise send you to non-sterile). Same as passengers from the US, possibly Canada too - no security needed before boarding your next flight. (The opposite direction doesn't always work - Canada seem to be trying to allow sterile connections, but in a weird way where all arriving passengers mix, followed by allowing people to skip security based on their arriving boarding pass. The UK and the US simply couldn't care less and waste everyone's time.)
And ID checks at boarding are quite rare for Schengen internal flights IME. Some countries do it, but many don't. At least there is positive bag matching (at least relative to ticket if not passenger), the US don't even bother with that.