…since consistency seems to be unachievable…

I’ve flown a lot in my lifetime, both before and after the September 11th watershed. As everyone knows, airport security worldwide has been tightened since then, leading travellers in an increasingly Kafka-esque dance of “what do these guys want from me today?” The rules are unfathomable to begin with, are inconsistent from airport to airport (for reasons never clear to the public) and, at any given airport, are subject to change without warning or signage.

Problem

We approach every airport line with the same set of questions:

  • shoes on or off? (I now routinely wear slip-on shoes when flying)
  • laptop in or out?
  • what about videocameras?
  • jackets?
  • how many bags am I allowed to put through the scanner? (at UK airports, only one - you may have to consolidate, but they didn’t tell you that when you boarded in another country, did they?)
  • is my ticket supposed to be in my hand when I come through?

Many airports (I’m looking at you, any-Milan-airport) do not tell you before you get to the scanner what you’re supposed to do when you get there, so, after an unproductive (and possibly long) time standing in line, there’s a last-minute scramble to take laptops out and shoes off, put cellphones in, etc., at the behest of a bored guard who is going hoarse from saying it over and over.

In Bergamo the other day, Ross and I had both put our backpacks with laptops in them through the scanner before the guy watching the x-ray told us to take them out and put them through separately. The guard who had overseen us putting those bags into the loading end of the scanner had not mentioned the need to take laptops out (maybe it hadn’t occurred to her that women might be carrying laptops - I rarely see women travelling with computers in Italy).

Had there been a line of people behind us, there would have been quite a pile-up as we went back to get bins to put the laptops in and re-scan them (especially since there were only two bins of adequate size available). And after that the guy on the other end had us open them up and turn them on while he swabbed them as well!

Solution

Signs at the beginning and at intervals throughout the security line telling you exactly what’s expected, so you have time to prepare while you’re waiting.

Heathrow has TV screens with multimedia presentations, as well as printed signage, all along their (long, slow) security lines, so you know what’s supposed to be in and out of your bag well before you reach the end of the line. However, the newish rule that you can only scan one bag means that before you ever get into that line, you are stopped by a guard who tells you that you must consolidate your backpack-plus-purse (or whatever combination) into one package before he will let you into the (long, slow) actual security line.

This results in a milling crowd of people crouched on the floor sweating and swearing at their luggage, with the guard hovering menacingly, telling them unhelpfully to hurry up and clear the area. Then, trembling with stress and irritation, you find yourself spending 40 minutes crawling along the actual security line and wondering how you’re going to get your laptop out of your now-jampacked backpack, as the signs make clear that you will have to.

Why couldn’t the multimedia on the TV screens simply be updated to reflect the new one bag rule? I suspect that it’s a Flash presentation, probably done by some costly outside consulting firm, and no one considered when it was commissioned and created that it might need to be updated. (Frequently, at that.) The whole TV announcement screen system needs to be rethought and rebuilt for more flexibility and the ability to update quickly for rapidly-changing needs and situations.