Originally Posted by
MileHighLawyer
I got out of CDG yesterday in 5 minutes. That's from the plane landing to me being in the taxi on my way to Paris (hand luggage only). The French are hardly famous for their ruthless efficiency, so how comes they can get it right and BAA is total pants? Security? Scale? Incompetence?
Actually it's more due to the design of CDG. The reason why it's a delight on arrival (except for the regular passport queues!) is the same reason why it's a nightmare on departure: designed so that pax have as short a walk as possible from taxi to plane and vice versa, before they had to add all the various checking and scanning etc that means that as a departure airport it doesn't really work.