As Petrus (and I) pointed out, the photo - which is from Sunday middle of the day - is bad but it was a bit of a one off:

- temporarily reduced South capacity
- made worse by over-running night work
- school holidays ending in the UK
- school holidays starring or ending in many European flights
- even taking holidays into account, a high level of passengers for a Sunday
- (I'm making this up but I think I'm right) a slightly higher than usual level of staff sickness


I've posted about the situation on Sunday on another thread, but it is still relevant here.

When I connected on Sunday morning from JFK to EDI arriving at about 0730, I could not believe how quick (about five minutes) it was to get through conformance, passport control, domestic mug shot, up the escalator to FT security, where there were only five people ahead of me in the queue. Brilliant I thought, the best since the removal of domestic fast track. But security is where the trouble started. At least half the bags were pulled over for manual searches, inculuding both mine and Mrs MD's, the first time ever that we have both been 'selected'. It seemed similar on other lanes and the staff attitude and comments were even worse than usual. Fellow passengers started to complain about the delay and were told, "The more you complain the longer it will take and you will miss your flight". It took half an hour for my bag to be cleared, by which time I could see the queues building back to the top of the escalators. This is presumably when the trouble started downstairs as reported elsewhere.

So what was happened to cause such a high proportion of searches at that time? Presumably there was not problem earlier, as there was no knock on effect on our way to security. A specific threat? A change of crew? A higher number of inexperienced travellers with liquids or other suspect items in their bags? Only one of the five bags I witnessed while waiting had a problem (an airline amenity kit and lipstick that was swabbed and/or rescanned).

Nevertheless, we still had just enough time for a coffee and bacon roll in the lounge. Other passengers might not have made their flights.

Sorry about the mistake in the attribution of the quote above.

I've posted about the situation on Sunday on another thread, but it is still relevant here.

When I connected on Sunday morning from JFK to EDI arriving at about 0730, I could not believe how quick (about five minutes) it was to get through conformance, passport control, domestic mug shot, up the escalator to FT security, where there were only five people ahead of me in the queue. Brilliant I thought, the best since the removal of domestic fast track. But security is where the trouble started. At least half the bags were pulled over for manual searches, inculuding both mine and Mrs MD's, the first time ever that we have both been 'selected'. It seemed similar on other lanes and the staff attitude and comments were even worse than usual. Fellow passengers started to complain about the delay and were told, "The more you complain the longer it will take and you will miss your flight". It took half an hour for my bag to be cleared, by which time I could see the queues building back to the top of the escalators. This is presumably when the trouble started downstairs as reported elsewhere.

So what was happened to cause such a high proportion of searches at that time? Presumably there was not problem earlier, as there was no knock on effect on our way to security. A specific threat? A change of crew? A higher number of inexperienced travellers with liquids or other suspect items in their bags? Only one of the five bags I witnessed while waiting had a problem (an airline amenity kit and lipstick that was swabbed and/or rescanned).

Nevertheless, we still had just enough time for a coffee and bacon roll in the lounge. Other passengers might not have made their flights.

I think the problem is primarily the staff (mostly their attitude and lack of efficiency). Other airports manage to do manual searches about 10x faster.

Of all the things airlines / airports / immigration do badly, queues of this sort are what grind my gears the most. The thing is, they know precisely who is turning up, and at (roughly) what time. Literally, to a person they know the maximum number of bodies who will be entering and leaving their facilities. The fact they seem completely incapable of managing this process (which is simply repeated day after day, with little variation beyond unforeseen circumstances and spikes in passenger numbers at certain times of the year) tells you all you need to know about the management of the various agencies and organisation involved.

Just to rub salt into the wound, we all pay a tidy sum for the honour of being part of these scrums, and to be barked at by surly and unhelpful staff on the ground. It really is poor for such a new facility, and BA should be as irritated and angry as we are. But of course, I suspect they couldn't care less

Why were they especially grumpy and even slower than usual on Sunday morning?

Sorry about my failure with edit function above

Has c-w-s or anyone else that uses this frequently enough raised this with HAL?

I think the correct way they should approach it is to warn you that your flight may not depart from B or C and therefore it's strongly recommended to use A.

If you then say you're aware of the situation and know the walking route back to A then they should let you through.

A bit like a bmi domestic and the old Star Alliance lounge in T1 (unlike the bmi international lounge, the Star Alliance lounge admitted golds on a domestic). Many staff at this lounge particularly in the early days used to discourage you from using it and direct you to the bmi domestic lounge. If you said you were aware of the time needed to get to gate and preferred to use that lounge they'd let you in.

"The more you complain the longer it will take and you will miss your flight"

Isn't this a criminal threat of retaliation under UK law? Next time someone hears this they should call the police.

The manual bag search at T5 is the slowest I've seen of any airport anywhere, by far, and easily adds 30 minutes during busy times. They basically have one person per bag scanning belt, that person takes a bag, identifies the owner, opens the entire bag, places all of the contents into a pair of bins, uses swabs, goes over to a machine to test for explosives, eventually comes back, then reruns it all through the machines, and then repacks it for the passenger, then waits a bit, and then thinks about the next bag. This process easily takes five minutes per bag, with the passengers delayed by this getting increasingly frustrated and furious that they're going to miss their flight (I was delayed by this on my way to India last year). They then rightfully complain and ask questions of the one person scanning the bags, which further delays their process. And then you mix in the staff changes which seem to happen whenever I'm in transit and have a bag that was randomly pulled aside for search.

Contrast this with the process in the US, or Netherlands or Germany or anywhere else where I've seen this happen. They take your bag aside, quickly go through it, find the thing they were concerned about, run that thing and the bag separately through the scanner. In parallel, while the bag is running through the scanner, they run the explosives test if they care to do so. Total extra time is ~2 minutes.

I think this extra scrutiny of bags at T5 started about 18 months ago, and ever since then, T5 security has been much slower on average, especially when in transit. If you're going to search more bags, you need extra staff to do the searching, and you need a more efficient process. From what I can tell, that's never happened. The TSA and other countries also have enough staff to take the bins away faster than a passenger could pick them up.

By contrast, TSA has seemingly responded very favorably to the criticism they've received, and most of the time, they're actually pleasant and efficient, which is pretty shocking given how awful they were just a few years ago. I think the threat by airports of replacing them with private security staff forced them to improve their image. Each airport in the US can either choose to use TSA staff, or hire their own security staff that needs to go through the TSA training.

And of course TSA PreCheck is like having a time machine back to how security worked in 1999 (unfortunately BA hasn't paid for this service for their flights, and you can currently only use it if you are flying most US carriers, or Air Canada).

When we transited as a family in the summer, we saw the FCC transfer line backed up a long way, and the fast track immigration had no queue. So we entered the UK. When we went to the lift up to security, we were told we could not go up yet because security was too backed up, and they were only allowing passengers with a flight departing within the next two hours to go through security at that time. So we went the arrivals lounge, explained, the problem, and BA let our family in thankfully.

While BA can say in public that there's nothing they can do, I have to assume they are applying pressure wherever possible, as no one is going to complain about HAL, they are going to complain about how bad it is to fly BA.

Ohhhhh no. T3 can be even worse. However it looks like we agree that LHR is the worst. I have never seen anything so slow anywhere else.

In Australia, explosives testing is routine (random selection) but it doesn't take ages. Additional bag search anywhere else does not take an inordinate length of time. Australia is a country famous for one or two people doing a job and two people just watching and standing around doing nothing (OK, that's the typical roadworks...), but even they do not spend ages standing around chatting instead of working. Neither do they just watch the trays mount up instead of clearing up. Even the dreaded SYD work more efficiently, politely and faster.

Agreed. They are particularly speedy at SYD T3. Explosives check is normally completed within 60 seconds. Very efficient.

This has been my experience on the few occasions that I've been subject to an additional bag search at T5. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of gripes with T5 security, but at least this has never been one of them...

I got a secondary check a few weeks ago and was left to repack my stuff myself at the end!

You can add my vote on that to the list!

Indeed, I have been picked for a check at Melbourne and it was all over and done in the blink of an eye. ^

Last Sunday was my first time to experience T5 security screening (North side). When we got to the fast track BP scanners, the agent there told us that was now only for golds to use, but to try anyway our CE BP. When the doors opened, he said we were lucky...?

However, after that we found indeed a very long queue to reach the screening and me and husband thoughts were in the order of "so much for fast track" and "if this is fast track, how it is for the standard lines"

The previous week, Saturday first afternoon, we went to the T3 transfer pax security screening and there was almost no one. 5 minutes or less and we were through.

We don't know what's going on behind the scenes at LHR security. As the security alert grows to severe I expect extra checks have to be made without giving staff much if any warning.

Personally I'm not sure if I like security checks being carried out by Joe Public anyway.