BuildingMyBento

Don't you use FT to learn things? What's wrong with learning a little more than you expected to?

Also, are FT users normal? There are still less than 700K members worldwide...

They may be easier to guess if they were limited to one country, but even that would be a stretch. However, it is generally simple to know if an airport is in Canada (much of the time, it begins with a "y.")

gottaluvNW

If anyone has time to waste...

http://airportcod.es/#

Christopher

I read today that Swedish parliament is looking at legislation to enable Sweden to effect a quick temporary closure of the Řresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden (or the Öresund Bridge if you prefer it in Swedish) (see, e.g., here).

Passport-free travel between Denmark and Sweden, and the other Nordic countries, really has little to do with Schengen and dates back to the creation of the Nordic Passport Union in the mid-1950s, so the imposition of any sort of controls on any of the intra-Nordic countries is quite extraordinary.

And regarding (what I see as) the over-use of abbreviations, just like KLouis I find them very irksome (and not just on FlyerTalk forums)!

GUWonder

The Swedish government wants to get the Swedish parliament to authorize the government to have a unilateral ability to close the bridge without having to get parliamentary approval thereafter and without having to provide advance notice. They've been mulling this even last month.

Most of these governmental characters pushing for this stuff barely use this bridge and/or have no idea how disruptive such closures would be to the communities that rely on the bridge nearly daily or even to their own costs of goods and services.

A closure of the bridge (even for weather) creates major havoc in the lives of persons living and working around the region as lots of people live in one country and work in the other; and usually the weather-related closures are announced in advance or planned around in advance courtesy of anticipation of reported bad weather pending.

The daily commute being disrupted -- especially mid-work-day without much advance notice -- would result in hundreds if not thousands of Swedish and Danish children being stuck at daycares and schools with no adult at their home to return to for the night. And I won't even get into the situations where people needing to give birth in a hospital have had to be sent to Copenhagen across the bridge because Swedish hospitals with open beds were too far away.

This is almost as bad an idea as the opposition party members who advocated for putting machine guns pointed at the bridge.

I guess boats will become more popular. Already, some people are buying boats to cross from Denmark to Sweden. And while the government can go after so-called human traffickers' boats, not sure what they can do to go after refugees' own boats. At least two cheap boats with refugees have managed to come into Sweden from Denmark although the Swedish officials only have reports of one such entry as of yet. And given how many harbors there are in Sweden, shutting them all down is going to only irk the wealthier and better connected Swedes and thus unlikely to happen and happen effectively.

Ghentleman

to stay with the OP's question: German airports (FRA, MUC) had police at the gates on arrival, "randomly" checking passengers. I'm putting "randomly" between quotes because from what I've seem, it looked like some racial profiling was involved.

GUWonder

There racist profiling is indeed involved; and usually the targets of racist profiling at those two airports are allowed to pass upon a quick eyeballing of the passport/ID -- mostly done without running the physically-presented-to-police ID/passport against any electronic databases.

Ghentleman

My idea exactly. If you decide to do checks, do it well. This is just a charade.

GUWonder

It largely is a charade, but it also seems to catch/stop/divert some people who are legally subject to being denied entry, have their movements restricted (at least pending some deliberations of sorts) and/or arrested. It sometimes even diverts people who are otherwise going to be considered admissible.

In some cases they are looking for people without documents of some type; and in other cases they are looking for certain types of people with certain types of document used at some point in the journey.

The authorities seem to think a show of force (even with farcical elements) is adequate -- even as there are ways around it. This is sort of like squeezing a partially-inflated balloon, even if they did full investigative checks of every document in passenger possession at the airports.

submonte

Yes it is more a show or a random check on base of visual criteria but not consequently done.

As example the major highway border crossing points

A1 (Austria) to A8 (Germany) at Walserberg (Salzburg/Bad Reichenhall)

and

A12 (Austria) to A93 (Germany) at Kufstein/Kiefersfelden

are controlled, in a way that 2 or 3 tracks are reduced to 1 where cars have to slow down to step speed and the vehicles do pass a police officer without stopping. I have never been stopped or controlled (local German car reg. no., newer middle class car, white, European appearance, short hair, decent dressed - after all my experience living more than 40 years in the border region, so also before Schengen, I think those are the criteria). Austrian local cars are not stopped as well normally. Small transport vehicles might be stopped even if they have local registration.

The minor border crossing points (Federal roads and state roads) at the same places are not controlled, rarely they put a police car there but stay inside.