Funilly enough, two legs of my trip last week were into and out of PHL. The return leg was at 6.00 pm on Friday evening, prime-time. Obviously, these were domestic flights and the security may be different for international. I went through security in less than 15 minutes, and that included a very complete handsearch of carryons and reference to a supervisor for a questioned item. I thought the staff were well-trained, courteous and very thorough, and they obviously had their SOP's well in place.
If I have a gripe about security, it is that it can be confusing to the harried pax where to go and when to go there. When many checkpoints are available and only some are working, there should be better measures to show pax which are open and which are not. [charitable mode] This may be how some of these breaches occurred[end charitable mode]. Some of the security staff might work harder on communicating clearly and precisely what they want from pax who need to do more than just pick their bags off the belt. But overall, I thought it was working very well, much better than in the days right after 9-11.
The woman whose problem started this thread obviously made some error of judgement - what, she thought that just because she was in a hurry, that she wasn't going to be checked? Pax have a responsibility to take security seriously also. Once she became a issue, it took some time for her to un-become one. Where did she expect she would be held - the airport Marriott? "Like an animal in a cage"? Dam' straight!
llater,
llamas