Making things better for the passenger - Airport Security
Until recently I have had no problem with airport security. In the past the inspections have been speedy, unobtrusive and necessary since the days of random hijacking and bomb threats from militants.
Sadly, what was once acceptable has exploded into a form of government sponsored paranoia that most sane and respectable people find utterly revolting and quite unnecessary.
Humiliating and degrading passengers and flight crews by making them remove shoes, belts and articles of clothing and then further upsetting them by confiscating liquids, gels and baby food simply sends a message to terrorists that they have won.
Out of interest, what happens to the tens of thousands of factory sealed after shaves, shampoos, hand creams, drinking water and foodstuffs that are confiscated? What happens to the thousands of miniature key ring penknives (deemed by some cretin somewhere as an offensive weapon) and costing us £ 10 a time (in the UK) to replace?
No doubt ‘they’ will have you believe that it is destroyed but I suspect that a sizeable proportion of it ends up on the shelves of the local ‘open-all-hours’ to the mutual financial benefit of all concerned.
The greatest failing at UK airports is in the positioning of the security check points, concentrating them (as they do) at a single point before entering the main Departure Area. This is very, very bad planning and does nothing but create an enormous bottleneck leading to long queues of increasingly disgruntled passengers.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the check points are frequently understaffed.
I once stood in a queue at Heathrow for longer than the 55 minutes I had left before boarding, leaving me frantically telephoning the airline on my cell phone to explain that I had checked in on time, my baggage had been loaded but that I was now unable to get to the gate for my flight because I was stuck at Security.
Thank God someone from the airline ground staff came and rescued me, taking me through the empty First Class security check so that I could board without delaying the flight. It solved my problem but caused a lot of angry muttering from the people I left behind in the queue.
At many of the world’s airports the Security Check is carried out at the point where you enter the Final Departure Area – the point from which your flight actually leaves and that is exactly where it should be. There could half a dozen aircraft waiting to board passengers in that area but, because they are not all departing at the same time the throughput of passengers is staggered and the security check is much quicker and a great deal more efficient as a result.
Also, the security teams are mobile – ready to move to another location if one Final Departure area is quiet whilst another is busy.
Oh that UK airports would adopt the same system!
I realize that this deprives the airport shops of a ‘nice little earner’ in replacing all the stuff that has been confiscated from passengers but hard luck! Sometimes someone other than the passenger should get screwed!