July 11th - Aviation security eases – but only at some UK airports
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rejoice! For the first summer since 2006, passengers at some UK airports can leave all electrical items and liquids inside their cabin baggage at the security checkpoint. Al Titterington, Birmingham Airport Terminal Operations Director, has been telling me more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are allowed to leave your liquids, your electronic items, remove things out of all of your pockets, |
| 0:06.3 | prepare yourself to put everything possibly into one trade, because that will speed up your journey |
| 0:11.3 | through security. |
| 0:12.4 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 11th |
| 0:17.7 | of July. And rejoice, passengers. Well, that's what I did when I heard that Birmingham Airport |
| 0:24.3 | became the first major UK airport to remove the very annoying limit of having to have all your liquids, |
| 0:33.4 | aerosols and gels in 100 milliliter containers or less and all packed into a clear resellable |
| 0:41.1 | one-liter plastic bag. The man responsible for overseeing all this is the terminal operations director |
| 0:49.1 | Al Titterington. We're here Al at Birmingham Airport. It's a busy day, but I can see that you've got, well, a very small queue for security, people whizzing through pretty fast. |
| 1:02.7 | Yeah, absolutely. That's what our intention is and having that restriction lifted, as you say, so passengers can take their liquid through up to two litres is a real improvement |
| 1:11.9 | in terms of our offering to our customers but also really improves the efficiency of the lanes |
| 1:16.8 | in terms of the queuing times and the efficiency of a customer going through there so really pleasing |
| 1:21.9 | that in june when we went live with this albeit quite quietly as an introduction, we've seen the benefits and |
| 1:28.5 | the improvements that's given them not just to customers, but also to our colleagues in terms |
| 1:32.8 | of their persons of passengers through the day. And of course, Birmingham was among the first |
| 1:37.7 | large UK airports actually to have new kit installed last summer, but then you were instructed that you couldn't actually put it into practice |
| 1:47.0 | or rather the old 100 milliliter rule had to stay? |
| 1:51.0 | Yeah, disappointing last year, but that's it. |
| 1:53.0 | That's in the past now. |
| 1:54.0 | We've had the equipment since June last year. |
| 1:57.4 | We've been working with that in terms of improving our efficiencies, |
| 2:00.3 | looking at certain that we can improve, knowing that at some point we were going to be able to use |
... |
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