The following is the text of a letter sent to the UK Times newspaper late yesterday, not by me; perhaps it will be used, perhaps not.
Sir,
There is a new, insidious threat to air travellers’ safety.
For most passengers,security screening is a terrible nuisance, but not a major problem. The majority only endure it a few times a year. But aircrew are subjected to exactly the same process every time they go to work. Many experience it three or four times in a single day.
According to many confidential incident reports, at many UK airports the security staff, often quite low-grade, are increasingly aggressive, hostile and rude to aircrew, and “delight” in carrying out frequent full body searches, emptying bags, and generally making life difficult. Aircrew now reach their aircraft seething with contained anger. This is dangerous enough, but the time the crew needs to settle down, and to check the aircraft and paperwork, including essential navigation notices, is also being badly eroded. It is important to understand that these reports analyse the errors that have already happened as a result of all this, and are not simply about the security staff and procedures which they describe and cite as a contributory cause.
It is an absurd regulation that requires an operating crew to be searched aggressively for the weapons needed to take control of an aircraft by foul means, when they are going to take control of it in any case five minutes later because that’s their job. The assertion that “everyone must be treated the same” is as ridiculous in its earnest stupidity as it always is, but is the only explanation advanced so far. There are many ways that the problem could be overcome without reducing aviation security standards, about which I have great experience and knowledge, by one jot.
The Civil Aviation Authority, and the Department of Transport, should not be allowed to continue down the traditional Civil Service route of masterly inaction until an accident happens and people are killed by the aviation security regulations rather than saved by them.