Originally Posted by G-BOAC
Utter bollox from BAA as usual
I don't see people with much more hand luggage in the past few weeks than ever before, yet I see massive queues. I also see (1) scanning machines sitting idle (2) metal detectors closed off (3) clumps of staff standing around chatting at the end of security not dealing with people desperately trying to pass through. So the solution is clearly not for BAA to pull their bloody finger out is it? No, it's clearly to penalise pax further? Don’t admit it’s your problem, shift the ‘blame’ elsewhere and further inconvenience the people you’re already inconveniencing. Laughable. What a bunch of clowns.
It's no coincidence that the airports which are the biggest pain for the pax are those which centralise security scanning. These are by no means only in the UK. (In transit at CDG once, the security queue was backed up to the top of an escalator. This meant that people arriving on the escalator were being forced into the scrum that was the "queue" for security.)
As pax volumes continue to increase, it is inevitable that security scanning will have to be decentralised. This will be painful (& expensive) for the airport operators, like BAA, whose strategies in this area are the result of poor long-term planning coming from 'management' that is even worse. For examples of first-class security screening strategies, just look at AMS or GVA or ZRH. Pier- or Gate-based screening, especially the latter, allows for fine-tuning the system to meet the operational requirements. Much as I would like to think otherwise, I have a nasty feeling that LHR T5 will not have learnt this lesson.
Russ