Originally Posted by
hockeyguy
Probably not. The airlines don't want to have to reaccommodate pax who miss their flights due to security wait times. They also don't want to have people showing up many hours early and clogging up their checkin facilities, lounges, etc. It's unlikely that whatever little payment they may get from BAA is worth the trouble.
Wasn't the strict 1-bag rule supposed to help reduce security screening times? I really hope this doesn't mean that they're going to try to put in a "0.5 bag" rule now (i.e. shrink the allowable size significantly).
I do have to say that a 10 minute upper limit is pretty tough. I doubt many U.S. airports, even smaller ones, could meet that requirement all the time. A 5-10 minute average time and maybe a 25-30 minute max might be more reasonable based on peaks of passenger traffic at various times during the day. I'd be willing to accept that as long as there were significant consequences for exceeding the max time so that it didn't happen very often.
I can remember an occasion a couple of years ago when the BA check in broke down and when they fixed it, they flooded security with people, BAA couldnt cope and ended up paying the fine. I asked if there was an arrangement in place for when the airlines disrupt security, but apparently not, so in theory the airlines could earn money out of this.
The 10 minute queue is checked every 15 minutes and BAA were allowed to fail 45 times in a month. Im not sure if this is still the rule.
I went through LGW at 9.30am on a friday recently and the queue took about 10 minutes.