Kent Police State and Lydd

[Rood]

Has anyone else had to complete a form when landing at Lydd for Kent police detailing who they are and where they flew from within the UK?

Do road visitors have to fill it in too?

Strangely no such form had to be filled in when landing at Biggin Hill which was also in Kent.....

Is it legal to demand this information?

[2Donkeys]

Sounds like Special Branch throwing their weight about again. They did this at Newcastle for a while until the weight of public ridicule encouraged a change of heart.

2D

[LysanderV8]

Lysander

Flew into Lydd yesterday on my QXC and filled in the form. They said they may be introducing a loyalty card to give regular visitors reduced landing fees. As an aside, I had to hold for 10 minutes orbiting to the North whilst waiting for 2 Jaguars to blast down 03 at 50ft !

[Jodelman]

Went into Lydd a little while ago and refused to give more than the aircraft registration and where I had come from. Had a phone call from plod a week or so later berating me for wasting his time in trying to trace me as I had not given my date of birth!!

[Wycombe]

Lysander, think you will find that one of the principal names behind the current developments at Lydd is a recently-retired senior RAF Officer.

Perhaps he asked them to pop by.

[Kolibear]

*Thread Drift*

They said they may be introducing a loyalty card to give regular visitors reduced landing fees.

So is the loyalty card in the name of the pilot, or the aircraft? If 10 pilots each land the same aircraft there once, is the aircraft a regular visitor or not?

[jammydonut]

Sound like "stable door - horse bolt" after the £53M Kent heist

[Mike Cross]

The criminal fraternity are notorious for giving their true names and addresses and for using vehicles registered in their own names.

[IO540]

I often wondered what could possibly be the point of the current GAR form, going to the Special Branch.

I mean, nobody is going to put "terrorist" under Occupation.

The entire point behind it must be that

a) the "criminal" is travelling under his real name, and

b) the police know about him, and

c) he doesn't know the police know about him

Otherwise, it is just pointless data collection.... perhaps, just in case a new "criminal" name turns up and then you can see where he has been (assuming all of a) b) and c) of course).

I suppose that a) is a reasonable assumption, because travelling under fake documents is hazardous.

But if the criminal gets a fake passport, and changes it regularly, the whole reporting system falls apart. So, the only people they might catch are the amateurs. Reasonable enough I suppose.

[Andy_R]

I thought Lydd had actually stopped this. They always used to insist on you filling out all your details, but on the last couple of occasions I have not been asked to.

[niknak]

Every time you use your credit or bank card, along with many other electronic transactions, a record is kept of where you are and what you've done.
Every time you fly into an "airport", your personal details (name, address and video image) will be recorded.
So what does this onerous task take out of your valuable and important lives? 5 minutes at the most I would wager, what does it cost you? nothing I would suggest..

Since banks, market research agencies and the supermarkets probably already know more about you than you do, I really don't know what the problem is.

Stay cool, enjoy flying and worry about things that are really worth worrying about....

[Fuji Abound]

.. .. .. but I am not convinced that is true.

If we want to go to Jersey now, we have to fill in a GAR, we have to report our movements to the police and we have to notify customs.

The form filling puts me off to the point at which I sometimes cant be bothered to go.

If I drive to London I want to get out of the car and have a coffee not tell the car park attendant who I am, where I have come from, why, what my date of birth is and the rest of my life history.

Anyway are the police entitled to ask for this information!

[IO540]

On a more practical note, this triple reporting requirement (with only one of them, IIRC, being doable by email) means that prior to departure one needs to either rummage around for a fax machine with which to fax the form (to potentially any of the three), or have a laptop with a GSM/GPRS card which can send faxes.

Recently I got a Voda 3G card, and got rid of it once I found it didn't support plain old GSM fax.

[Fuji Abound]

IO540 - got the tea shirt, how right you are!


At least you can still phone through the flight plan, very nice people at Heathrow - I tried phoning through the SBC once, and the fella was out for lunch!

Europe has woken up with Schengen, but we still like our bit of water and we are very good at bureaucracy - after all we have nearly got the oldest civil service in the world!

If we are being followed around with our chip and pin, PSCs, mobile phones and all the rest I don’t suppose another form will achieve a great deal more other than Lydd receiving a great deal fewer customers!

[Rood]

To answer NikNaks question, yes it may take only 5 minutes and I maybe on Sainsburys database but there is a prinicple.

That is that we live in a free country. If we continually cave into some unelected official documenting our every move we are no longer free.

This is security for effect not for our safety.

So the cost of the exercise is much more than time its our freedoms. Something a lot of people died for.

Soapbox over.

[IO540]

I am quite convinced that very few terrorists will make it to Lydd. Kent is so remote. There are houses in Kent which are half the price of identical ones in Sussex - because nobody can find them. The Child Support Agency has given up on Kent - everybody there has the same DNA.

Flight plan filing is easy now - www.homebriefing.com

[Pronto]

I always understood that Biggin Hill was in the London Borough of Bromley, part of the Metropolitan Police District, and thus policed by the Met, not the Kent force. That may account for the different approach noted by Rood in his initial post.

P