3 months on at Heathrow
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This morning I flew out of London Heathrow airport for the first time since the escalation in security measures. In that time, I've flown numerous times in and out of London Gatwick. Here's my impressions.
Baggage Check: Gatwick seems much less effected by the heightened security measures than Heathrow. Speaking to a BA bot as I waited for the "fast drop" baggage check, he said that at Terminal 4, they'd been changing the arrangements almost daily. Sometimes there were loads of desks open for this, other days there were very few. Even the number of self-service check-in machines apparently changes from day to day. Today, I only had to wait about 5 minutes to drop my bag off.
Central Security: The line for boarding pass and security check was almost endless. Even when I entered the terminal, the way pas was blocked by the queuing masses. It was probably 100 yards past the end of the zig-zag formation. The boarding pass check wasn't holding things up. It was the carry-on and personal checks that were taking the time.
At Heathrow, they're trying out a full body scan machine - aiming to reducing we hope, the need for physical body searches. My thought is that for a long time, until the technology is perfected, the number of people requiring to have even a cursory manual body search will increase. This is as yet to be seen.
Thankfully, the line I was ushered into did not require shoes to be removed. However, just in front of me, a family of 6 (including a very small child still in a push-chair and "grandad" in a wheel chair) basically dumped their bags and coats - I think I counted 11 bags of varying descriptions - into the roller track and went through the security check. Thankfully - only cos I'm a miserable old git - they were told to go back and put the bags and coats through the x-ray machine themselves. This also revealed that one of the bags had a laptop computer in it (which is required to be removed from the bag and placed through the x-ray machine separately now - only ever saw this in the US before, and what good is it) but, this just added to my delay and my amusement quotient.
Oh, and having asked the 4 girls in front of me in the line, without looking up and seeing my ugly mug sans beard, proceeded to ask if I have any make-up in my bag. When I replied that "no, I've left it all for the wife to use" she looked up and blushed.
Thankfully, having anticipated such extended delays by reading about the experiences from others, I had left loads of time to get the flight. As it turned out, once I'd walked to gate 19 at T4 (it's now where gate 15 used to be some 5 years ago) I only had 10 minutes before they started boarding the plane.
The rest of the journey was all very uneventful. The train from Zurich airport to Baden left at exactly 15:04 (the scheduled time) although the train on the next platform was running 10 minutes late. Probably because a cow had wondered onto the branch line tracks.
2 days of workshop on application migration to come. With all the migrations I've done over the past 3 or 4 years I should have a lot to talk about! But, there again, when don't I?
Bookmark :
This morning I flew out of London Heathrow airport for the first time since the escalation in security measures. In that time, I've flown numerous times in and out of London Gatwick. Here's my impressions.
Baggage Check: Gatwick seems much less effected by the heightened security measures than Heathrow. Speaking to a BA bot as I waited for the "fast drop" baggage check, he said that at Terminal 4, they'd been changing the arrangements almost daily. Sometimes there were loads of desks open for this, other days there were very few. Even the number of self-service check-in machines apparently changes from day to day. Today, I only had to wait about 5 minutes to drop my bag off.
Central Security: The line for boarding pass and security check was almost endless. Even when I entered the terminal, the way pas was blocked by the queuing masses. It was probably 100 yards past the end of the zig-zag formation. The boarding pass check wasn't holding things up. It was the carry-on and personal checks that were taking the time.
At Heathrow, they're trying out a full body scan machine - aiming to reducing we hope, the need for physical body searches. My thought is that for a long time, until the technology is perfected, the number of people requiring to have even a cursory manual body search will increase. This is as yet to be seen.
Thankfully, the line I was ushered into did not require shoes to be removed. However, just in front of me, a family of 6 (including a very small child still in a push-chair and "grandad" in a wheel chair) basically dumped their bags and coats - I think I counted 11 bags of varying descriptions - into the roller track and went through the security check. Thankfully - only cos I'm a miserable old git - they were told to go back and put the bags and coats through the x-ray machine themselves. This also revealed that one of the bags had a laptop computer in it (which is required to be removed from the bag and placed through the x-ray machine separately now - only ever saw this in the US before, and what good is it) but, this just added to my delay and my amusement quotient.
Oh, and having asked the 4 girls in front of me in the line, without looking up and seeing my ugly mug sans beard, proceeded to ask if I have any make-up in my bag. When I replied that "no, I've left it all for the wife to use" she looked up and blushed.
Thankfully, having anticipated such extended delays by reading about the experiences from others, I had left loads of time to get the flight. As it turned out, once I'd walked to gate 19 at T4 (it's now where gate 15 used to be some 5 years ago) I only had 10 minutes before they started boarding the plane.
The rest of the journey was all very uneventful. The train from Zurich airport to Baden left at exactly 15:04 (the scheduled time) although the train on the next platform was running 10 minutes late. Probably because a cow had wondered onto the branch line tracks.
2 days of workshop on application migration to come. With all the migrations I've done over the past 3 or 4 years I should have a lot to talk about! But, there again, when don't I?