Originally Posted by
MissChief
Very worst was at Manchester Airport (MAN). Absolutely no surprises there.
Haha yeah as MAN based crew I totally get this, I hate going through there. I swear that damn metal detector hates me, f***** thing more often than not lets me go through then beeps like 5 seconds later. I swear when I leave I'm going to take a sledgehammer to the bastard thing. As for the staff, it really depends as sometimes they are quite nice but on other occasions they can be absolute c***s. One morning (around 4.15) the metal detector flags me or a full random, fair enough, the pat down is fine but the swab sets the other machine off making all sorts of noises. I ended up being stuck there for 25 minutes waiting for their duty manager to come and ask me some questions. Meanwhile I was unable to contact crewing to advise them that I was going to be late (and unusually there was no other crew from my airline passing through, normally there'd be dozens). By the time I was released I was so stressed out, I told the captain about it and he did offer to send me home but I operated anyway, filed a complaint with MAG but nothing came of it (all I wanted was to be able to use my phone to call crewing but I was not allowed to touch my stuff).
As for the tales of overzealous security, back in 2006 when they had a knee-jerk reaction to ban liquids they tried to take the ink cartridge off one of our captains, he politely explained that he didn't need the ink cartridge to do any damage given he is the one flying the bloody plane.