Foreign Perspectives

Many years ago when Belfast was in the peak of the troubles, Belfast airport was right up there with Tel Aviv as being the safest airport in the world to fly from.

There weren’t any of the fancy scanners in those days. None of the loop detectors to find metal on you either. Yet, nobody ever managed to carry anything onboard that they shouldn’t have. How come? Simple: the security people were really well trained and knew exactly what to look for ie who would be most likely to carry something on and where that they’d carry it.

It’s a different story these days. Just a few weeks ago, I flew from Belfast to Manchester and the security was a complete joke.

The security questions asked by the checkin staff were the usual joke. Nothing special there: they’re so rehearsed in them and the passengers are so rehearsed in the answers that there’s little point in asking them nowadays.

But then it gets really silly.

I’d forgotten to bring my trusty clear plastic bag so instead just put my 30ml and 60ml bottle of contact lens solution on the top of the pile. For a change, I’d remembered that my luggage scales cause the security people to panic so I took them out of the case and put them on top of a plastic bag with some magazines I’d just bought ie in plain view.

First off, my five year old had to remove his shoes before the scan which might seem a touch silly but in that he’d been randomly selected it is quite a sensible security check.

As expected, the luggage scales caused the usual panic and the security guy rushed over after they came out of the scanner. But he didn’t check them. Nope, instead he got all difficult about the two bottles not being in a plastic bag. Now, if he’d actually been trained he’d have realised that they should have been in a plastic bag so that they couldn’t be concealed so having them sitting in plain view on top of a plastic bag was OK.

All he could do was rant on about them being in a plastic bag and point to those on sale for £1 but I didn’t have the £1 coin.

Several minutes of ranting on and his colleague intervened. Was it OK to carry on contact lens solution at all? Well, yes actually it is and in fact they are specifically listed amongst the permitted items. Was it useful for his colleague to read the ingredients of one of the bottles? Not really as I doubt very much if he was sufficiently qualified in chemistry to say what could be done with that combination of chemicals.

A little more ranting and another colleague asked if she could test one of the bottles. OK, but knowing that the solution was pH neutral doesn’t really say a whole lot.

And finally, everything was OK.

Except that it wasn’t…. nobody even looked for the luggage scales and they do look incredibly suspicious on the scanner. They SHOULD have been checked and they weren’t. The only thing worse is runner beans which look like a string of detonators and if you ever want to see a security guy really scared try putting some in your handbaggage and watch the reaction.

Not only did he completely forget about the original reason for rushing over but he even ignored me when I reminded him about it several times. What was particularly bad in this is that he fixated on a minor thing (ie two tiny bottles in plain view when they should have been inside a clear plastic bag) and completely forgot about the major thing (ie something very suspicious picked up by the scanner).

That says to me that the quality threshold of security staff at the airports has had to be lowered considerably courtesy of all the extra “security” checks that are imposed these days.