florens

corporate-wage-slave

Hand searches at LHR are now quite rare, compared to many other airports: it's usually just the oblong area shown up on the scanner, which may well be a deliberately random area, and if the oblong is on an arm of someone wearing short sleeves then a visual check is fine. HAL staff are, I feel, quite aware of the sensitivities here. General frisking has more or less stopped, thanks to technology doing a better and faster job. Elsewhere the deployment of panel based millimetre wave scanners (the ones where you stand alongside a big board rather than an enclosed unit) can do a more effective search in 32 milliseconds than several minutes of manual searching. So technology is making this a better and faster process.

It's laptops and tablets that have to come out, and these days there is a heavy overlap (e.g. Chromebook devices). Kindles can be seen to be at the bottom end of the tablet range, but as with anything where is doubt, along with lots of wires and other small electrical items, it's best to have them out on the tray, if only to rule out other complications.

Seraglio

In defense, at T5 there are so much signs that show you what you should do. It's not that difficult to understand. In my opinion travelers seems to simply ignore it and think the rules do not apply to them. I find a hand search unpleasant as well, and i am not female. Its not that cool if a total stranger touches your body and private parts. but it's easy to prevent it. If you have metal in your shoes, take them of. People prepare themselves very good for their trip, but not for security at the airport and then try to "bend" the rules.

Globaliser

Isn't that the truth? Many FTers - often quite brazenly - as well as non-FTers.

fransknorge

There is something interesting here. At LHR I never get frisked, while at other airports using millimetre wave scanners I nearly always get frisked as my right shoulder always beeps (FRA particularly). I wonder what differences are between those two airports that I got 100% hit in one and 0% in the other.

corporate-wage-slave

Well it could be a number of things, assuming you haven't had surgery in that area, but these scanners come with some settings that relate to aspects such as how still your shoulder is. Now if the scan time is longer (we are still talking milliseconds) then the chance of movement is greater. Some people have neurological responses such as tics which could be insignificant but the wave scanners may pick them up. The way these things work, at least in modern devices, is to send a set of electromagnetic radio waves at the passenger, the echo back is then transcribed into a data stream (so there is no image created, contrary to popular belief), and this data is then compared against expected / normal results. There has to be some allowed tolerances in there, but different devices and different airports can lead to this inconsistency, and sometimes they reduce tolerances at times of high threat. Historically FRA also did badly in some audits so maybe there is some over compensation here.

Incidentally these devices don't like sweat, for good reasons. So if you are running around FRA too much - very easy to do! - then that will create false positives and thus a hand search. If you glide gently into Heathrow then that would perhaps be the other extreme.

squawk

fransknorge

Thanks for the details, very interesting.
I did not have surgery in my right shoulder, but I do have arthritis and other pleasantries finishing in "-is" due to Ankylosing Spondylitis. It seems that it acts as a cheap medical scanning tool too if it is sets to "sensible" .

wrp96

I still have unfriendly feelings for T5 security after having to wait over an hour for a secondary bag search because I hadn't pulled my phone out of my bag (I had pulled out my iPad and my Nook and my liquids). Oh and then to hear the security guy tell the person in front of me it didn't matter to him if we made our flights.