BasilBush

It’s encouraging that FTLHR, as a representative of HAL, is responding to some of the points made here. I want to congratulate him for putting his head into the lions’ den!

However I can’t let him get away with a couple of his statements.

Firstly he states that the CAA licence says that Fast Track is not included in the security queuing metric. Yes indeed, but this is mainly at HAL’s behest – the LHR airlines argued for it to be included in targets, and if HAL had agreed then the CAA could not reasonably have objected. So it’s a bit disingenuous of FTLHR to pin all the blame on CAA. On the same topic, HAL objected to the CAA’s proposal that HAL should not funnel non-status pax into Fast Track, accusing the CAA of a fundamental misunderstanding of the security process.

Secondly, he defends the fact that the service standard only covers queuing time ahead of security (as opposed to the whole security screening process) on the grounds that the service targets are set for a 5 year period and could not therefore cope with changes to DfT standards in the interim. This is a weak argument. He will know that the CAA’s price control formula allows HAL to pass through 90% of any additional security costs via an increase in airport charges (the so-called ‘s’ factor). If the DfT changes its standards therefore, HAL should seek to maintain overall security processing times by increasing resources and passing the costs (less a 10% efficiency factor) onto airlines. There may be a delay while HAL is adding the required new resources, but this could easily be dealt with through an extension of the current ‘s’ factor mechanism. Passengers should expect to be processed quickly and safely, and the fact that the current targets only covers part of the process is not sufficient.

I know that FTLHR is one of many people at HAL who are trying to change the old ways of doing things, and I wish him well. For too long (around 30 years in my experience), Heathrow has tried to pretend that it is in some way unique, such that it is all too difficult to do things in the way that other airports around the world seem to manage. Key HAL staff need to get out more, and accept that they can learn from elsewhere.

Kgmm77

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Whilst I welcome the explanation, I'm not convinced by the argument for siting the measurement point pre-security.

For one, it creates a clear incentive to allocate resource to primary screening security. As despite was was said, it's very easy for primary security to continue to process quickly whilst a handful of secondary bag searches (some of which are random so "no fault" by the passenger) mean a wait of 20+ mins with no impact on the pre-security queue.

The secondary search queue will only impact the pre-security wait when the secondary trays back up to the x-Ray exit.

paulwuk

The following queues exist

1. Queue before conformance
2. Conformance to Security start (start loading tray)
3. Finish loading final tray to start unloading first tray
4. Time from tray scanned to tray actioned on a Secondary

As it stands, (1) is added as a "fudge factor", (2) is sporadic, with people on the ground encouraging scanning when queues aren't moving, and discouraging it during normal time (i.e. lengthy queues). (3) is a bit trickier to measure, it depends on the backlog before the scanner. (4) Is easy to measure, as the x-ray machine knows when the final xray of the tray was taken, and knows when the secondary screener (L) starts the check. During my 16 minute security process at T2 fast track last night, my laptop was pulled aside for a random swab. It was first in the queue, however as I was also being patted down (another random scan), the person decided to send it back through again, and it emerged behind 3 other bags, the first of which wa full of large liquid bottles that the passenger decided to argue about. Fortunately L's boss turned up and when I complained apologized, gave it a quick needless swab, and let me on my way.

Only (2) is in the official timing, despite its unreliability, and it doesn't apply to Fast Track.

FTLHR (and thanks for posting here) says
Many times there are simply too many trays (empty or otherwise) backed up on the run-off post-machine, which slows the entire (3) and (4) process down. Yes, build these longer. If you need, remove some shops to make space (!!)

As for the peaks -- every day is a peak. Perhaps Heathrow Staff should arrive at work at gate A10, and not clock on until they get post security. After clocking off the same process should happen again. Perhaps things might change then?

BasilBush

Well said paulwuk. If John Holland Kaye and Normand Boivin (HAL CEO & COO) were challenged to simulate an Int/Dom connection through T5 Fasttrack every day for a month before starting work (and without being allowed to switch lines) they would soon do something about it! Perhaps FTLHR should suggest it to them. Seriously.

You are also right that the "peakiness" argument is flaky. LHR is the least peaky airport in the UK, a fact acknowledged by HAL in its abandonment of peak pricing several years ago. If HAL can't cope with the extremely limited variation of pax flows throughout the day/week/year, then heaven knows how they would cope with a normally peaky airport.

Also it really isn't on to make unsubstantiated assertions that dealing with the peaks would require a doubling/tripling of resources. He refers to HAL staff being trained in six sigma techniques, but no one who really did understand such concepts would make such unscientific assertions. Queuing theory will tell you that the difference between no queue and an infinite queue can often be a matter of very small changes in processing capacity. Given LHR's flat and predictable pax flows it is reasonable to expect that a small increase in processing capacity would lead to a big reduction in queues.

IAN-UK

My comprehension of this breaks down post-comma; but the first part suggests nobody within HAL's higher levels of management takes this at all seriously. Pretty damming, don't you think?

But surely coping with change is what HAL's managers are expected to handle. Lord knows, they are paid well enough for taking on the job. It's sad that they are paralysed in an environment they believe should be set in stone by the quinquennial review.

The additional costs cited represent something of a red herring as the regulator allows for post-decision adjustments which should cover mandatory changes to security requirements.


"The trick is to be smarter?": the trick is to have a competent management team. Heathrow is choca most of the time. Peaks are slowly rolling hills.

Absolutely the data is important! But even more important is doing something with it, and here I sense your frustration with people possessed of "vast operational experience". Six Sigma analysis and solutions may not mix so easily with that pool of experience.


Sadly the regulatory review is an expensive game played between knowing partners. Boats are seldom rocked. The framework established allows HAL to relax into a comfortable world where it can trade off the costs of non-compliance against those of compliance: aeronautical revenues are more-or-less fixed for five years. There's very limited incentive to improve, to initiate change which isn't going to reduce costs/increase commercial revenue.

Land-of-Miles

Isn't this a classic Theory of Constraints problem or Ops Management 101. When you have a bottleneck then you keep that part running at max capacity (you don't have only 50% of security lanes open). You also subordinate all other process to keeping the bottle neck running at 100% (e.g. Having plenty of space and a "run up track" and no stupid automated plastic bins) so passengers can sort out their bags ready for security ahead and minimise the time standing about. You would split out secondary screening to another area so that it doesn't Impact primary screening (the somewhat half arsed T5 solution mingles the same queue and compounds belt blockage.

All in the big problem is that the airport operator doesn't care about passengers as their customers are the airlines (except when they are lobbying for expansion and suddenly they are essential to our economic prosperity). Most airlines (especially BA at T5) prioritise average cost over passenger convenience and care not a jot about the security experience either. The CAA as regulator cares more about cosy relations with the airports, airlines and government and keeping its gravy train rolling rather than giving a jot about passengers.

Thus we have an endless Groundhog Day experience. I would hazard a guess that the best way to improve security processing experience given the current hierarchy would be for the government to reward the airport with the best passenger feedback with the new SE runway. Watch the extra recruitment and staffing at T5 then.

FTLHR

I wouldn’t go quite as far as calling me a representative, I’m speaking in a personal capacity and let’s say playing devil’s advocate on behalf of the airport with some inside knowledge. Thank you all for your comments on my earlier post, I am going to try and answer them as honestly as I can but I'd ask you to be mindful that I can't share as much I know and I can't always say what I could off the record.


Yes the airlines would prefer that it was included, the current set up is that the airport is held to account by the airlines on a metric that the both parties agree on. The license does say that; “The CAA agreed that fast track lanes, if paid for separately by the airlines, should never be used to supplement any capacity shortfall in the general lanes. HAL should make sure that there is sufficient capacity to meet the central and transfer search standards in the SQRB without having to rely on fast track lanes that are covered by separate commercial agreements.” So any area of the airport where you see supplementation taking place is either an exceptional circumstance, a breach of the license or an area without a separate commercial agreement. The disagreement is on whether the Fast Track lanes would be dedicated, designated or priority. Airlines want dedicated and in T2, 3 and 4 they have that. You’ll notice two terminals missing from that list, one is closing the other has on-going discussion taking place so I won’t comment.

Having re-read my paragraph on this I should have made it clearer that I was referring to the potential of paying out £24m in SQR not as additional costs of operating security which it could be taken as. These would come out the passenger’s pocket via the s factor element of the license. I absolutely understand that waiting time to security doesn’t cover the whole process and that isn’t sufficient to capture the experience of those enduring secondary bag searches and any associated wait. I don’t know what a metric that covers passengers from ticket presentation to clear of the back end of the lane would look like but I think it would be very punitive if Heathrow had to pay out based on the number of passengers that leave bottles of water in their luggage. The discussion about why the measures are the measures I’m not going to touch and I will say we could always do more in making passengers compliant for the process at all stages before the tray goes in to the x-ray.

Around 5% of trays going through the x-ray have liquids in them. These take, even with a directed search over 2 mins 30 and usually more like 3 minutes to do (I know it feels like longer). Given that most passengers have two trays and that non-compliance is very much not an independent event in the probability sense when you have over 3 million trays a year with liquids in you will get a run of rejected trays or certainly a high proportion of rejects in the dozen or so on a lane at a given moment. Two alternatives here, either there are enough staff and room to deal with each rejected tray or there isn’t and there’s a wait. Being that we don’t know which lanes are going to get a burst of rejections before the event we have zonal staff to help out but frequently it is not enough. Throw in the random rejections we have to do, machinery that doesn’t have uptime of 100.000% and that’s were issues arise. All of this works to slow down the flow rates and the impact of this is that the queue between the TP and the 2nd scan (or TP to archway in other terminals where it is based on a crowd measure algorithm not per passenger.) gets longer. I’ve run the correlations myself, the longer any constituent part of the process takes the longer people queue. Time to security doesn’t exist in a vacuum where time through security isn’t making an impact.


I agree and disagree here. Heathrow isn’t unique but it has issues that some other airports don’t. If all other aspects are kept the same; technology, processes, quality of staff etc. the three issues that make security fundamentally different to other UK airports are sheer volumes, proportion of passengers with low or little understanding of English and the higher number of trays per passenger. The first isn’t a problem as such but there are issues where it makes life harder but lots of passengers is a good thing so we should not complain about that. The second we should learn to overcome, it is the nature of a hub airport. The third is the tricky one, the demographics of our passengers do mean that many more of them don’t fit their belongings into two, three or even four trays this obviously increases the workload of the x-ray. Here is the only legitimate “it’s different at LHR” point, if we scan trays as safely and efficiently through the x-ray as other UK airports we won’t process as many passengers. That’s the only one that is an excuse rather than a reason for sub-optimal performance but it’s a known quantity so should be considered anyway. I think that the demise of BAA has made things easier in terms of that last point and there is recognition that best practice can be picked up from other UK airports and AMS from the security point of view. When it comes to best practice with customer service we look across the world to what is being done in SE Asia / Asia Pacific and we should expand our security view as wide as well.

FTLHR

Yes, that is true and while we haven’t put resources there the implementation of parallel loading is attacking the bottleneck at the front and the longer lanes mean that build-up of rejected tray pax now needs to be longer to affect non rejected tray pax, a good thing I hope you’ll agree but doesn’t solve the issue for rejected pax and especially the no fault ones. Work is being done to explore flagging the non-fault random pax to searchers earlier but that still requires an explanation to why someone has been skipped forward to the other waiting pax. Improving the back end of the process will be the next priority after improving the front.

I'm sympathetic, I know what it is like to wait for a random test behind other people who aren't compliant when you are in a rush as I have to use staff search fairly often never mind when I do fly. Despite it not solving the issues at he back of the lane we are quite right to implement something that makes significant improvement to flow at the front.

FTLHR

One of the conditions of the licence is that there must be enough room for (2) inside the queue maze for the length of the time in question. So if there was a queue stretching back into (1) we know we have failed for that 15 mins and the ‘fudge factor’ is only establishing by how much.

I mention here http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/newre...ply&p=24356277 why there would be little point in trying to game the scanning of BP and at the moment there is no way to identify the tray auctioning point to TP scan or BP scan at the podium, requires the x-ray to know who the passenger is. The duration of (4) is known however in the newer lanes and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that at some stage it would develop into an internal metric if it doesn’t become an external one.

Tray removal is an issue, I’ve seen it discussed on here and see there are two schools of thought on it. I won’t bat for either side but I will say that it is the more senior members of staff on shift that spend a chunk of their time putting the collection of spent trays away when they aren’t engaged in something. If they are engaged in something the trays may or may not block the lane for longer. I’m not sure if you have been in T5 South recently but Boots there is not open and four lanes are being added to South where the escalator will eventually push through from connections. More lanes, more staff and fewer shops is a very easy point of view to put forward if you are travelling on business and spend a lot of time in the lounges. I’m not saying it doesn’t have an element of truth but for some passengers the retail offerings are more important than the collective view of this forum would suggest. Please don’t take that as Heathrow value retail income over more security lanes, it is a balance and it’s not for me to decide what the balance is. T5 design is what it is, I don’t think that anyone would build it with a separate north and south area today if they could I hope these additional lanes will show that we are making an effort.

FTLHR

The point about connections is an important one, I dare so a large proportion of senior management at Heathrow have used the airport departing and arriving on many occasions and have formed opinions based on this. Have they ever connected through it let alone regularly? unlikely I’d say and that gap of experience probably has an impact on some level.

For peakiness, I can’t pretend to know much about other UK airport. Some days in certain areas we do so see large concentrations in volumes in a short period of time. Sunday after 1700 in T5 is a good example with domestic and connections trailing off and the morning periods seeing 40% of the day’s pax squeezed into a 6 hour period not 7. I base that comment on more than just numbers however; increase in archway metallic activation, bag rejects, number of trays per passenger all vary throughout the day and 2,000 passengers who arrive in one hour can take far more processing time than 2,500 that arrive at another dependent on these factors. It is not sheer concentration of numbers on a Wednesday in T4 that makes it challenging, though that does impact, it is the number of passengers who aren’t compliant, have an above average amount of hand luggage and many of whom have limited comprehension of English as well as other challenges such as a larger share of young children and less mobile pensioners. Again, a known quantity to a degree but there is only so much in the way of extra resource that can be thrown at an issue like that.

I certainly don’t claim that 2x or 3x the resources would be required to see a larger improvement, far from it like you say. However every time there is someone waiting 2nd, 3rd or higher in line for a secondary bag search you would require more resource to deal with that. If I wanted to reduce the number of people waiting 20+ minutes for a secondary assuming I had the space and equipment to do so an extra member of staff per lane would help massively but not solve it. The longer lanes in T5 South have space for 7 or 8 rejected tray before they stop the machine rather than 4 on the older lanes but still get stopped for a good 20 minutes a day for this reason. My comment was about processing all passengers, 100.00%, within 10 minutes from TP to being cleared of the area. An unrealistic scenario that requires an over the top increase, some passengers bag searches take a long time, not of all them have to, but some of them do. So it’s not unsubstantiated, more taking the argument too an extreme end point. A sensible metric of “no more than x% of passengers waiting for secondary searches longer than y minutes.” wouldn’t require doubling or tripling of resources, I agree.

Other than the 33% increase in lanes in T5 South the big improvement you will see this year is the parallel loading which if you don’t have a secondary search, will reduce your queue time significantly as it does increase processing capacity. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that improvements for the back end of the lanes are the next improvement to be worked on.

thatsthebadger

FTLHR thank you for coming on and explaining some of the issues that regular travellers despair of sometimes. Can I ask - are the staff at T5 on a go slow? Watching them sometimes I think they challenge the laws of physics they move so slowly. Are they involved in some sort of dispute?

If not, what is the reason behind their apparent apathy?

FTLHR

Sorry, choice of wording was poor here. I meant manipulate the recorded queue times not affect the actual queues. I'm saying that the amount of time and effort required to rig the system to fake an improvement in queue times is greater than actually improving them. I can say with absolute certainty that there was an improvement from 2013 to 2014 and it was authentic.

Change is OK, it is uncertainty from the fluid nature of security threat or airline alliances coupled with the licence that I think many find challenging. Some things are almost set in stone, others you know will change but not when and some changes are black swan events that are very difficult to plan for.

I stand by this, having every single lane open and fully staffed 20 hours a day every day of the year is not how any business should be run. Nor is running an operation at a level that can cope 'most of the time' as that means resolutely not coping for '1 - most of the time'. If we know that the wait times for bag searches peak at a certain time the answer isn't to ignore the problem or put extra staff in place all day. It is to proactively manage it. We should be talking about preventative medicine in Security not cures or ignoring the doctor's advice.

My reading of the water is that this may be changing. If we get to a place whereby we aren't paying out for SQR rebates as regularly (2013 £9.545m paid out for security, 2014 £3.50m) and we are fulfilling our license element how does the harmonisation of transfers and directs for Q6 tie in with our strategic air to be Europe's hub of choice and win a third runway? Is the expense of aiming to be hitting queue times < 4 mins 95% of the time worth the extra £ if it meant our ASQ scores in security went up and overall scores went up. Not a conversation that can be had until the basics are fixed and capacity is in place for known growth but hopefully we'll be having it soon.

FTLHR

Not to my knowledge.

What I will say is that when dealing with in the course of 80 minute's worth of rotations they will see around 100 trays on the x-ray screen, search through 6-10 bags, pat down 7 or 8 passengers groins and try and say "any liquids?" to up to 50 passengers as they try and juggle their trays. Multiply that out across a whole shift and four days in a row and the words "I'm going to miss my plane" probably have less impact when heard then when said.

Having said that, other airports and seem to do OK and it's no big secret that our scores for Helpfulness and being courteous are higher at our other terminals at Heathrow. Another aspect we are improving but could do more.

FTLHR

Now I know what a Reddit AMA feels like!

Calchas

Thanks very much FTLHR ^

In particular, the suggestion that HAL senior guys are not regular connectors makes a lot of sense, given how needlessly obstructive the process can be for the passenger. Yet the major irritants (needless re-screening of ex-domestics when changing terminals, wholly insufficient connections fast track capacity at T5, utter uninterest in Express Connections (i.e., "about to miss my flight") cards at security, no Int-Dom immigration fast track any more) are probably completely unknown to anyone who doesn't do the journey regularly.