You have just reminded me of an incident late last year which infuriated me so much that I wrote the below whilst in the lounge for a different flight later that day. I then completely forgot about it, but this just reminded me. This is what I wrote on the day and forgot to post!

This might be controversial so let me start with my understanding of the facts.

At T5 North Fast Track security, at the entrance to the security check area, where you decant your possessions into the trays, there is a boarding pass scanner on the right hand side.

From previous FT threads I understand this scanner is used by HAL to, perhaps amongst other things, measure stats on the time taken from entering security (where your boarding pass is scanned) to actually going through security.

Given that not all customers boarding passes are scanned, it is clearly not an important or mandatory scan.

This morning there were about 20 people queuing and it took me about 20 mins to clear security. During this time a female member of staff (I assume a HAL manager and not part of the security check team) came over to instruct the member of security staff manning the security area entrance to stop scanning the boarding passes of the next 20 customers.

She came back around 5 mins later and asked the latest people to join the back of the queue for their boarding passes. She then took them to the “stats scanner”, scanned them and returned them to the passengers.

I can only assume these actions are to manipulate HAL’s security processing time stats to look better than they actually are.

Very happy to be corrected and I don’t think I’ve seen this posted before (or not recently at least).