New Terminal
Have many of you that have been extolling the virtues of the new terminal headed for the security checkpoint on Thursday mornings in August / September 2008? The queue reached all the way back to "The Red Bar" and then retraced itself back to the escalators. People arriving up the escalators had very little room to manoeuvre and indeed many of them jumped the queue causing disagreements with people already in the queuing system and I use the word "system" advisedly! In addition there were some people (not very many) coming out from the Food Market restaurant area who also felt they were entitled to just push into the queue.
From my observations during the 45 minutes it took to progress to the top of the queue there was no interest shown by any passengers in the Food Market restaurant. Indeed the entrance was not visible as you would have to push your way through the security queue to reach the entrance. I cannot see how the restaurant operator is happy with the layout.
By the way all the security channels were open and fully staffed and functioning normally. The main reason the queue was very long was because of the large number of departures scheduled between 7.15 and 8.15 during that time period. I can only guess at the chaos if there were a few addiitional 737 or 320 flights or even 1 or 2 transatlantic flights at the same time. However I don't think airport management need to worry too much about this problem in the current climate. Let me state that the time taken to pass through the security queing system was totally unacceptable for passengers
By the way it was not a "once-off" problem. I travelled on 4 separate occasions on Thursday during the time period.