Salocin

Airport Security : Valuable Investment or Incompetent Timewasting?

I flew to Belgium this weekend, and went through the usual checks and measures that we have come to expect since 9/11 where people and aircraft come together. Security checks, x-ray machines, extra passport controls and a vast number of security staff. All ostensibly to increase our safety.

The process for getting to the aircraft at Heathrow is now much more involved than it used to be.

• Check in, involving a passport check, ticket check and security questions regarding my luggage.
• Entry to departure lounge, involving a ticket check, passport check, luggage through an x-ray machine, me walking through a metal detector and me getting a pat-down search.
• Walk to departure gate, halfway down the corridor there's another security check where they put my luggage through an x-ray machine and make me walk through another metal detector - no pat-down search this time.
• Get to the gate where they check my ticket and my passport one more time.

That's a lot of checks, so you can imagine my surprise when, upon arriving at home in Belgium, I opened my computer bag and found my penknife on top of all the cabling in the side-pocket. My penknife is a very large model that has lots of built in screwdrivers and the like which I generally use for fixing computers, but also has 2 knives, 2 saws and various other sharp metal pointy things.

It's hard not to ask questions. What is all the security for if they can't pick up on a utility knife in a computer bag? Is the 40-minute delay as they ineffectually frisk through and irradiate your private belongings merely a deterrent?

On my return, I was passing through Brussels airport, where the queue for the x-ray machines was very long. This meant that I spent most of my time in the airport queueing rather than shopping, eating or otherwise spending money in the expensive concessions of the departure lounge - no doubt an unfortunate side-effect of the post-9/11 paranoia for those concession-holders. Luckily, this time I had remembered to put the offending implement in my hold luggage. Not that it would have mattered, because while the technicolor image of my bag's innards passed by on the screen, the security agent manning the machine was facing the other way, chatting to a colleague.