Passing through the First wing this morning the full body scanner failed twice to detect my form at all triggering what they called “a double yellow”.This involved a manager being called and me being taken into a private room for a full body search by hand.

According to the initial security agent this was a fault in the machine, but the manager insisted that this was a random selection for full search. If this was true then they weren’t very well set up for it as the manager had to be called to perform the search and there was no log book in the private room for recording it (he was calling someone else to bring a new one).

Apart from the delay it caused and the inconsistent explanation of why I had been selected for this, two things surprised me.

First, they wanted me just to leave my luggage on the conveyor belt. I pointed out that this would
just cause a massive backlog for everyone else (I had 3 trays) so they moved it to the public repacking area. I refused to leave it unattended while I was searched - which they seemed to think was perfectly fine - but eventually a spare security agent said she would keep an eye on it.

On the rare occasions I have been stopped for
enhanced security elsewhere the first thing they have done is ask me to identify my hand luggage - which makes a lot of sense to me. Here they seemed to think I was being unreasonable not wanting to leave all my belongings, including documents, unsupervised: “there are cameras everywhere here” said the manager!

Secondly the search itself was remarkably standard issue. Just a lot more patting down but he didn’t even ask me to remove my shoes. It seemed no more personal than what they were doing in the public area to anyone who triggers the machine with an alert. I asked how this was in
any way different from standard security and they were both at a loss lol.