Originally Posted by
GUWonder
For example, at some airports in Asia -- SW/Central/South Asia -- they create checkpoints on the road leading to the airport that result in bottlenecks and herds being formed. That helps protect the main airport terminal building(s) and planes from being damaged by attackers but it creates sitting ducks in a proverbial barrel out of all of us human beings formed into a herd at the checkpoint/bottleneck areas.
I was just at some of these airports in SE Asia over the past week and have experienced many others.
When you put an initial security checkpoint at the airport doors it creates a large bottleneck outside. Some airports handle this better than others and have found creative ways to reduce the bottlenecks, but you still get a bottleneck somewhere in the system -- especially at peak times.
How about the ETD swab procedures they use in China as you near the check-in areas like at PVG - rope off 30, do 30 ETD swabs, release the group of 30. Again a bottleneck, but how about a more random variation of this?
Would seem to be a better solution aside from "false-positives" on the ETD swabs (false positives in quotes as they are technically positive for the trace material assuming its functioning correctly).
Just thoughts here, as I know there's no easy answers, but I suspect something may change after this in a knee-jerk reaction.
There's also what Rome FCO has done with the high security Terminal 5 for USA departures but that creates problems of its own as well.
SDF