Originally Posted by
ifu05596
Also had my belongings spread across loads of trays - never had that before to that extent! Been arriving into Man the last few weeks and it’s a bit grim but departures was just as bad!
The loads of trays is probably in response to having a lot of bags sidelined for secondary screening. I saw a sign in BFS, coming back to MAN, about not packing your hand luggage densely to speed up the security process. The more things you have in a tray, especially in the 3rd dimension, the more likely one item will occlude the other. In which case you will probably see it bounced for a secondary inspection. If the secondary queue fills up it stops the whole screening process as bags cannot clear the x-ray machine until the queue is reduced. I flew out of MAN T3 last Friday and saw exactly this occur. The downside of having things spread over lots of trays is the pick-up queue quickly fills up. If this is coupled with a slow-down on the magnetometer/millimetre wave processing, this also backs-up everything. Of course traveller error can add a lot to it. There was a family in front of us that took ~10 mins to get their bags ready, blocking the whole queue as some were already on the main belt. The agent asked, quite patiently, if they had any liquids or electronics. They said no, they proceeded to discuss what they might have, with each other, for a few minutes. Then opened their bags, proceeded to root through them and pull out lots of liquids, none of which were in the little baggies. Then the security agent asked if they had any larger electrical items, and specifically mentioned hair dryers, straighteners, kettles, etc. They said no. She then asked specifically about hair dryers, and made the motion of using one. After about a minute of discussion amongst themselves out came 2 hair dryers. This then repeated for hair straighteners, same process, and out they came. It was so bad, that the security agent actually thanked my wife for being so organised, especially with a 2-year old. Little did she realise that I had the majority of our hand luggage for that very reason, and we have become separated when the biometrics computer had crashed in the assistance lane and they proceeded to add a bunch of regular passengers to the queue in between us.
I think some of the issues we have are a result of the ever increasing charges for hold luggage. This coupled with the general inability of ground handlers to process bags in a reasonable amount of time, it typically takes about 30mins for some companies to get the first bag out, dissuades people from checking items. This significantly increases the amount of items that have to be screened, increases the likelihood that any tray will require secondary screening, and also the amount of general faffing about at both the front end back end of the screening process. This may be part of the reason why T3 and T1 tend to present worse experiences than T2 when I travel. More of the T2 passengers are either on international flights that include hold luggage or package holidays that do too. As compared to the masses of Ryanair, Easyjet and local European flights that do not. Incidentally, the new Ryanair hand luggage policy from Nov 1 may lead to some improvement at security, as there will be fewer bags going through the screening process. However, Ryanair, Swissport, and MAG do not appear ready for all the new checked bags it will generate.