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T5 security is a total disaster! [inc Fast Track issues]

Old Jan 20, 2015, 5:28 am
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Last edit by: hillrider
LHR charges for the cost of this screening to the passengers. For example, if you transited LHR on a round-trip in economy class from the US, you paid GBP 54.39 (USD 83.10) for this (on the ticket under tax/fee "UB").

EU Regulations state that "transfer passengers and their cabin baggage may be exempted from screening, if: (a) they arrive from a Member State [...] or (b) they arrive from a third country where the security standards applied are recognised as equivalent to the common basic standards [...] [E.g. the USA]"

Security control when connecting between USA and Schengen flights (European airports competing for LHR traffic)

SECURITY CONTROL both ways:
  • LHR

NO SECURITY CONTROL either way (Schengen to USA or v.v.):
  • FRA (A/Z-gates only) [Lufthansa hub]
  • MUC [Lufthansa hub]
  • AMS (from mid 2015 when reconstruction works finish) [KLM hub]
  • HEL
  • ZRH [SWISS hub]
  • CPH

NO SECURITY CONTROL from Schengen to USA (control on the way back from USA to Schengen):
  • VIE
  • WAW
  • ARN
  • OSL
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T5 security is a total disaster! [inc Fast Track issues]

Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:35 am
  #31  
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T2 seems so much better than T5 at the moment, ostensibly with much the same design. I simply cannot understand why BA puts up with this nonsense as nobody in their right mind, given a choice, would put up with T5. This must adversely affect BA's business.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:37 am
  #32  
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Originally Posted by simons1

If this happened in Africa people would just laugh and describe it as third world.
Except it doesn't - typically the 'worst' airports have the easiest security. Although maybe that's because there aren't many flights from them...
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:39 am
  #33  
 
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Is there some sort of unoffical industrial action causing this?

I cannot recall waiting more than 10 minutes in Fast Track. I'm next at T5 on Saturday evening to travel to IST, connecting from LGW on a tight schedule...I'm a bit worried to see this.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:41 am
  #34  
 
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Originally Posted by lhrsfo
T2 seems so much better than T5 at the moment, ostensibly with much the same design. I simply cannot understand why BA puts up with this nonsense as nobody in their right mind, given a choice, would put up with T5. This must adversely affect BA's business.
What choice does British Airways have? We got to have our terminal, but we can't exactly threaten HAL to move out and take our business to Redhill, Northolt or Shoreham!

Privatising the airports was the worst thing ever, next to privatising RailTrack. How can anything where there is a monopoly ever be truly competitive?
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:42 am
  #35  
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One excuse or cause I have heard is because of some X-rays being closed, and that over night rebuilding is causing the problems.

They are making a new hole in the concrete slab to make room for escalators from FCC to south Security, presumably this will become Fast Track FCC.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:45 am
  #36  
 
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The poor design of the tray system is definitely a contributory factor. There simply isn't enough space on the conveyors before or after the scanner for the average (non-FF) to sort out his/her things without holding up the line.

Secondly, it isn't obvious what to do with the trays. Ok, there are signs, but most people are focussed on grabbing their stuff and running. Given that the staff don't pile up the trays, this creates a problem. If you had a reverse conveyor, like at EDI, it would be obvious that you put the tray on its side, for it to roll back to the start.

There are so many design flaws at T5, I don't know where to begin.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:56 am
  #37  
 
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This really is disgraceful at the so called home of BA. I wonder if anyone at BA is concerned. Profits are up so I guess enough people are putting up with the incompetence at T5 security. Having made conformance but been caught in the snail pace security fiasco, I've nearly missed flights a number of times. I wonder how they dealt with conformance with queues like that. Come on BA, sort this out. Scenes like that make me wonder whether other airlines and terminals are better options.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 4:58 am
  #38  
 
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Anyone taken this image and tweeted it to BA?
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 5:00 am
  #39  
 
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Originally Posted by MrSimonR
The poor design of the tray system is definitely a contributory factor. There simply isn't enough space on the conveyors before or after the scanner for the average (non-FF) to sort out his/her things without holding up the line.

Secondly, it isn't obvious what to do with the trays. Ok, there are signs, but most people are focussed on grabbing their stuff and running. Given that the staff don't pile up the trays, this creates a problem. If you had a reverse conveyor, like at EDI, it would be obvious that you put the tray on its side, for it to roll back to the start.

There are so many design flaws at T5, I don't know where to begin.
That is not a design flaw. When T5 was designed, cabin baggage was restricted to a maximum of 6 kg economy, 9 kg Club and First class were allowed 2 pieces at up to 9 kg each.

British Airways' relaxation of the cabin baggage allowance has created this problem as well as the nightmare we have trying to get a full A319, A320 or B767 away on time. On a recent Warsaw flight, I had to get 30 bags tagged up and put in the hold before we could close the door, costing us a 12 minute penalty and the aircraft losing its slot.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 5:00 am
  #40  
 
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Even on a good day the LHR T5 security work really slowly. They walk slowly, they move the security trays slowly, they scan the bags slowly in the bag scanner, they are just slow, slow, slow. They are all uniformly slow.
Pretty much every other airport I go through has staff moving faster: Stansted, Amsterdam, Chicago, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Dallas-Fort Worth, are only a few that come to mind from recent travel.
I don't know their thoughts or any other circumstances, but their behaviour seems to exactly match that of someone who is trying to do their job as slowly as possible, acting as if they want to do as little as possible in the time they are being paid to be at work.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 5:01 am
  #41  
 
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Everyone should be recording their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the wee machines with the various smiley faces . We went through security last Friday without too much problem, busy and unbelievably inefficient but no huge problems.

Another passenger was obviously not so pleased. he hit the red angry face button (several times), walked away and then turned, came back and hit it a few more times for good measure . Hopefully this made him feel better.

Just for clarity - I do not think these machines will make the blind bit of difference
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 5:02 am
  #42  
 
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More proof that we have a anti-customer pro -shareholder tin-pot airline trading on its previously well deserved good name now operating worse than any LCC..................they paying public will soon wise up and see it for what it is.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 5:03 am
  #43  
 
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Originally Posted by Mattyb44
Anyone taken this image and tweeted it to BA?
^
Not a FF and I guess the few times we have been in T5 we have been lucky. I recall T4 a few years ago used to be this bad.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 5:03 am
  #44  
 
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The change to larger trays that they made a while ago was a bad move, in my opinion. Before, trays were smaller, but they slid back into the overall feeding stack and could be recycled around without manual intervention. For me, larger trays didn't result in using fewer of them, because by the time I put my backpack, belt and electronics in, I have to use 2 trays anyway. Longer trays also meant that, unless someone manually moved them into the feeding stack, it was easy for them to block other trays coming out of the scanner. The only reason I like fast track is because it usually has a shorter queue, not because the passing experience is a joy. On occasions, I have used the standard security lanes because they had fewer people in the queue. We sorely need the likes of Pre-Check they have in the US, but I am not holding my breath.
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Old Nov 4, 2014, 5:06 am
  #45  
 
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Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B411 Safari/600.1.4)

Originally Posted by bealine
Originally Posted by MrSimonR
The poor design of the tray system is definitely a contributory factor. There simply isn't enough space on the conveyors before or after the scanner for the average (non-FF) to sort out his/her things without holding up the line.

Secondly, it isn't obvious what to do with the trays. Ok, there are signs, but most people are focussed on grabbing their stuff and running. Given that the staff don't pile up the trays, this creates a problem. If you had a reverse conveyor, like at EDI, it would be obvious that you put the tray on its side, for it to roll back to the start.

There are so many design flaws at T5, I don't know where to begin.
That is not a design flaw. When T5 was designed, cabin baggage was restricted to a maximum of 6 kg economy, 9 kg Club and First class were allowed 2 pieces at up to 9 kg each.

British Airways' relaxation of the cabin baggage allowance has created this problem as well as the nightmare we have trying to get a full A319, A320 or B767 away on time. On a recent Warsaw flight, I had to get 30 bags tagged up and put in the hold before we could close the door, costing us a 12 minute penalty and the aircraft losing its slot.
Surely the cause is as much the tightening of hold baggage (charging) and negative perception of the timeliness and likelihood of hold bags appearing on the carousel?
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