Originally Posted by
triploss
...At least there is positive bag matching (at least relative to ticket if not passenger), the US don't even bother with that.
Nor does the EU airport I often use. As I mentioned earlier, the FR UK inbound and EU outbound to UK same aircraft flight (and maybe others - I have no experience of those at this airport)
always mixes the airside inbound and outbound queues airside of passport control in both cases. Passport control inbound is separately manned some distance from passport control outbound and both are the closest functions airside to the aircraft. Bags to the hold can be identified with the credentials of who dropped them, but as there is no further check that those people ever get on the aircraft or whether instead, they double-back after passing through gate checks and scans and passport control, but then leave the airport with the inbounds, the hold bags can no longer be guaranteed accompanied on the outbound flight, now can they?
The venue I'm referring to regularly has 2x189 pax opposite direction long queues completely mixed in a 4 meter wide, 30 metre long corridor with seats for whoever fancies them down the sides. It is so mixed that inbound pax often have to weave round outbound seated pax legs and bags and loose kids as they head into the terminal. On inbound I have stood for minutes with the outbound queue chatting to neighbours standing waiting to board outbound who by arrangement used my car to get to the airport (saves parking charges!). We had arranged to use two different keys but I could have gone with my gut feeling that one key handed over in the inevitable mixed queue would have been sufficient due to the recent disappearance of the partition between us!
The effect of the removal of the wall between inbound and outbound has the effect that they could have left the outbound queue and gone back landside with me, and that means they could have left one or more checked-in bags to fly to UK unaccompanied. No-one would have been the wiser other than if count was occurring on the aircraft (and who has noticed one of those recently on FR, eh?). Even with allocated seating there are no checks so long as everyone is happy and not getting cabin-crew involved. I sit in my allocated seat about one flight in five - I blag the other four because as a regular pax, I know where the likely unsold more comfortable seats will be and one time even got to sit in someone else's allocated seat because I'd blagged from cabin crew on the offchance, and cabin crew smoothly persuaded said dispossessed that another seat was just as good! So it isn't so much the pax being treated as automatically sterile - because it seems no-one notices whether we are actually there or not after we've been through the usual motions at the gate - we can just as easily turn up after that as an undetected surplus, or our empty seat can be an undetected deficit onboard. It's the checked-in bags that now seem to be being treated as automatically sterile.
And back to the rubbing shoulders aspects of a mixed queue, it just so happens my neighbours are from two separate non-EU countries, and they do not carry EU or Schengen ID.
So is segregation of inbound and outbound international pax and bag matching to actual flying pax at all important anymore ? ... I'm now guessing not ...
As Guages and Dials begins to highlight quite well, we have many effects which are a reflection of the gross inconsistencies that can occur with the permutations of 1001 different brands of hospitality versus almost as many combinations of slick transport and airport security operations. Cabin crew may smile and let me informally "upgrade" my seat and even sit in someone else's seat, but who am I? Unless they ask to see my boarding pass and ID (and they never have in any of the tens of times I've blagged a different seat) they've only got my word that I even belong on the aircraft in the first place, because I could be using another pax boarding pass - even one belonging to someone who is also on the aircraft sat in their proper seat or not, especially at the EU airport airport and on the airline I've alluded to. Alternatively I and everyone else could be sat in the cabin in the allocated seat of one who didn't fly but checked-in a bag which did ... but hey, it's part of life's rich pattern, I guess ... are we at all bovvered?