April 4th - The battle for smoother airport security

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Passengers are under stress at airports – they’ve all got a plane to catch, it’s an unfamiliar environment and now a stranger is going to rummage through their belongings. Many airline passengers say the worst part of any journey is the airport security check. People resent having to pack liquids in small quantities and then extract them – and electronics such as laptops and tablets – from cabin baggage. New scanners are being installed at checkpoints at all the UK’s main airports – but not fast enough to meet a government deadline of June this year. This morning the transport secretary has given airports an extension, but warned that they could be fined if they further delay the roll-out of smoother security.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 4th of April.
0:07.7	I remember exactly where I was a year ago. It was at London City Airport because the airport in London's Docklands had just come out with the fantastic news for an awful lot of passengers
0:23.3	that it was using entirely new scanners for its security checkpoints and therefore the whole
0:30.4	experience would be much easier. It was a wonderful day because, look, passengers are under stress at airports. They've all got a
0:39.7	plane to catch. It's for many people, a very unfamiliar environment. And guess what? You turn up and
0:46.7	then somebody starts rummaging through your belongings and criticising you for packing liquids
0:52.6	which are over the size of a tiny, tiny bottle.
0:56.9	And that has been the case, well, since August 2006.
1:03.1	The reason was that, well, there was a so-called liquid bomb plot,
1:07.7	the idea that terrorists would smuggle the ingredients for a bomb in liquids,
1:14.4	concealed in their cabin baggage, which they would then assemble on board and destroy the aircraft
1:20.8	and cost many, many lives. So overnight, well, there was a complete ban on liquids,
1:32.8	then gradually they were eased, and it is now the case that we have this.
1:46.4	For many of us, familiar limits, you can't have bottles which are over 100 milliliters and they can't be in a bag that is over 1 litre liter and it needs to be a clear plastic resellable bag now the problem with that is that of course many people will perhaps only fly through
1:53.4	an airport once or twice a year there's also the added annoyance these days very often you will need to take out your laptop, your
2:03.1	tablet, and that is a further pain. And this all adds to the time that airport security takes.
2:10.4	So it's a really difficult situation. And every day, thousands of passengers flying out of UK airports have everything from a bottle of water to, I guess, expensive beauty products confiscated at checkpoints.
2:25.9	We were hoping that those would all be a thing of the past at UK airports.
2:33.2	No less than Boris Johnson told us so in 2019. By the end of 2022,
2:40.8	he said all major airports in the UK will have the latest scanners. They use something called
2:48.5	computed tomography, very much like medical scanners.
2:52.6	And these CT machines analyze the molecular structure of the contents of a passenger's back.
	...

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