It's a peculiar airport in general because it's right in the middle of the old docklands on a bit of reclaimed land and only relatively small jets can land there. Unlike the other London airports which are all miles outside central London and serve all sizes of planes.
Fun fact - it's the only major airport in the world that doesn't have a control tower on site (to save space). It is remote controlled from 80 miles away.
> Transportation Security Administration screeners allowed banned weapons and mock explosives through airport security checkpoints 95 percent of the time, according to the agency's own undercover testing.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/us-airport-scree...
edit: I was a bit harsh, I don't have any real issue with the people doing it an it's probably untrue that most would be unemployed. What I really meant was that I find it strange that social programs are often questioned, but spending hundreds of billions on something not really necessary and creating jobs for it isn't.
This.
A simple look at the profiles of known attackers would reveal it's completely futile to screen literal 0-risk travelers.
Getting people to fear and believe that "everyone could be a menace" is a slippery slope and a slap at the core of our legal system (innocent until proven otherwise).
The liquid bomb threat really is the thing that conspiracy theorists would love: it's a totally made up possible threat by the Big State that hasn't been seen in the wild and is used to justify inconveniencing millions of people for no good reason. And yet it's just not talked about.
The fact that this works with so many people makes me warier of them than anyone it purports to protect me against. I don't feel safe being harassed by scowling officials in faux-important uniform.
In my neck of the woods, I have to take out basically everything from my carry-on. Laptop, camera, lenses, you name it, they want it out. Phone, keys, ditto. They usually ask for the belt to come out, too, and sometimes even the shoes. And this is even for internal flights.
LAX, by contrast, aside a circus number with some dogs sniffing people, was AOK. Everything stayed in the bag, the line moved constantly.
San Salvador (SAL/MSLP) was probably the most obnoxious, with a double security configuration for US-bound flights. Basically had to pass through security in Lima, then again at SAL, and due to the config, it meant you couldn't get food in the main SAL terminal and wait at your gate - you had to eat it before entering the "US Zone" and then hope you weren't thirsty again. Also, everything electronic out of the bag, dump fluids, etc.
Heathrow wasn't great. Long lines for security. Also, they had some buggy facial recognition system that couldn't match me (at the gate) to a photo taken a few hours earlier in the security line. And the gate agent was completely clueless about what to do next. They eventually let me board anyways. Not sure what they were trying to accomplish - I had already passed through security, the final face check was at the gate during boarding.
Reykjavik was fine, no different than a US hub. Same for Rome and Lima.
Inverness and Edinburgh had typical checks, but the airports are so small and uncrowded that it's pretty stress-free. The only "problem" I've had a both is the ticket agents tend to show up moments before boarding begins (first flight of day), which gets my anxiety up some - I like to be at the gate relaxing well in advance.
I've watched them dynamically adjust the levels of required "unpacking all your shit" based on how long the lines are getting.
My worst experience was in UK, multiple times, at Manchester airport. So much drama there.
Various airports have different rules.
Dubai was quite lax, you don’t have to take anything out of bags. Maybe they have the new scanners already.
Singapore was more strict, and they do the security check just before the gate which I hated because things like soft drinks etc purchased in duty free had to be consumed before going through (but again, no problem with baby liquids).
I've never known another airport to have this security setup, and as a massive transit hub, I really can't make sense of why they chose to put it at that point - but then again, what of airport security actually makes sense when subjected to reasonable logic?
I don't think we should be equating TSA with DEA and ATF. The latter two are practically military divisions operating domestically, the wars on drugs are unwinnable nebulous things by design to maintain these standing armies ripe for domestic abuse. TSA however does seem to be a security theater jobs program...
War on drugs is just a shitty political campaign slogan everyone fell for. It's a fantastic one from the perspective of the politician, because they'd never be held accountable for 'losing' it during their tenure.
I think it is great that British airports are relaxing their rules, but until that applies to the whole world, I will still arrive 2-3 hours before departure, knowing how unpredictable the situation at some airport security checkpoint can be.
It is almost as if the whole point is to discourage us to fly. It is great if you live in a country with access to high speed trains. Surely beats walking around in your socks or people with no empathy going through your luggage.
Many people are scared of flying and only do so, because they know it's the safest form to travel. If that would change, many people would refrain from flying.
I've had my swiss knife taken off of me when going through security check for the London - Paris Eurostar.
Very annoying, still not sure why it's forbidden.
After experiencing how easy it can be, traveling from the US feels like a special hell with the multi-stage papers checks and endless lines and shoeless security dances.
Would reccommend to anyone who moves servers around frequently.
We're talking about the worst joke of an airport in the world, after all.
And this isn’t a Brexit thing.
I’ve avoided transiting through Heathrow because of this silliness. Especially as they won’t let you bring big contact lens in your carryon while US/Canada does. Not cool to have it seized mid-journey despite staying airside.
What they are doing is normal and many airports in asia do exactly that.
Shoes we never had to remove shoes or if we had to it was for a very short period of time.
At least that is what they did at Helsinki-Vantaa airport here in Finland. This is what is being used now https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/products/920ct
Thou the new scanners didn't like my 3 stacked card decks or the 2 of 250ml "milkshakes".
Funny that the milkshakes needed to be drug tested while my 500mil smoothie was totally fine.
JFK has one of the new machines, but I haven't seen them use it yet.
When I flew through Beijing and had forgotten a can of beer in my backpack (<3 Julebryg), it was flagged on the X-ray, and when they guy found it, saw "it was just a can of beer", he gave it back to me. I guess that works too.
It was weird. I was the only one in line and they sent me through. You can keep shoes and belts on. Ushered into a telephone booth sized device. It had doors on both sides and puffed me with air. 10 or 20 seconds later the green light came the door opened and I walked out.
(I guess they're called "puffer machines") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffer_machine
https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2022/new-technology-makes...
When inspecting my luggage she pulled out every single item from my backpack with a glowing look of satisfaction on her face. She checked every single pouch for God knows what. I have never witnessed anything like it before.
When she got to the liquid bag I politely challenged her on the liquid policy which she could not properly explain in her broken English. She then took things personally and became agitated, verbally aggressive and retorted to phrases like: Is this your first time flying? What is your problem??
Her boss was called and he took 5 minutes of his time to explain things calmly and politely. Apparently gels like vapour rub or hair wax are considered liquids. We joked about butter also being a liquid since it's _spreadable_. All was good and I decided to head back to the front desk to have my luggage checked-in instead (liquids were over the allowance indeed).
But the lady I mentioned was high on her power trip and completely ignored my requests to hand back my ID, credit cards, phone, and backpack which were on a tray in her possession (behind the plexiglass screen). I asked twice and she just smirked and ignored it. Her boss also asked a couple of times until the penny finally dropped.
I've been at this airport many times before and have never experienced anything like this before. It's a horrendous abuse of power and overreach. Security inspection staff should not withhold or deposes people of their legal documents or belongings. It's degrading and abusive.
I stole a glance at the screen when my bag passed through one of these--looked like CT. The user can examine and freely rotate a transparent model of what's in the bag.
I always wondered if you could use different energy X-rays to attempt to analyze what things being examined are made of.
The people also apparently were only convicted of bomb-making and nothing to with airplanes (allegedly being arrested to purchasing an airline ticket made the airline charges not stick).
As well as here's what the register had to say after learning about through the trial how the attack would've worked.
> Could the bombs have done that job, in fact?
> The answer, unusually, is yes. The three convicted bombmakers - unlike other UK-based terrorists seen recently - had everything ready to assemble devices which would have had a good chance of getting through airport security as it then was.
...
> Does the liquids limit prevent this kind of attack?
> No, not really.
> It's fairly easy to get round, in fact; a big team of terrorists with boarding passes for many different flights could bring many small amounts of liquid main-charge through security and combine them afterwards, still needing only one detonator, one firing device and one suicide bomber.
https://www.theregister.com/2008/09/10/liquid_bomb_verdicts/...
Apparently “spreadable” is one of the criteria. I’d argue anything is spreadable if you try hard enough.
That's exactly what I said.
For all the fuss about whether oat milk should be called milk, there are people of room temperature IQ level intelligence that get confused by peanut butter.
I suspect they just fancied a nice lunch.
Meanwhile I’ve flown a few times with a forgotten pocket knife in my carry on and more than 100mL of water. Nobody died and the plane landed safely at destination.
Although it looks quite similar to plastic explosives the security team had not once a problem with it.
The building of it and the budget overrun was a disaster, and demonstrated the worst of infrastructure building in this country, but will happily die on the hill that the result is good, actually. (If we want to get into contenders for "worst in the world", my opening bid is ATL.)
This logic kind of falls apart when you think about it for a minute and:
1. Most airports have water fountains
2. Food and snacks are allowed through security. If it's all a conspiracy to make a few $$$, why aren't snacks banned under similar pretences
3. Many airports are now scrapping the rules with new machines
4. It would imply some sort of agreement between the stores and the security operations at thousands of airport worldwide - all individual agreements or a mass agreement, quite the scheme!
Not in Germany
As someone who used to visit the west bank for work I've spent many hours in intimidating interrogation, appropriated laptops, missed flights and most recently 3 days in a horrible prison without access to a shower or fresh clothing, after being denied access to the country for completely nonsense reasons. And the security argument is complete BS most of the time, NGO employees get the same kind of treatment.
The Ben Gurion approach really only works well if the border personnel likes you, A.K.A you're of the right ethnicity, which is not a shining example of how it's done right IMO.
The Israeli's have perfected their airport security over the years and it's a multi layered system of intelligence, profiling, observation via camera's and no doubt lots of high tech. By the time you get to security, they know exactly who they are dealing with. You wouldn't get anywhere near there if that wasn't the case.
And as they've learned the hard way in Israel, security checkpoints can also be active targets. A lot of the gaza and west bank border crossings have been targeted in the past. Basically, any concentration of people is a potential target. So if somebody with a bomb makes it even close to a checkpoint, they've already lost. They need to catch people before that.
The chaotic scenes in European and US airports in the last decades where you regularly have thousands of people piling up in front of security checkpoints, kind of drives home just how low that particular threat actually is. It's a security nightmare. Yet it rarely goes wrong. There was an attack in Brussels airport a few years ago and it was pretty awful but that's one of the few times that actually happened. Otherwise what happens at airports is security theater. It's mostly not actually about security but about plausible deniability when things do go wrong.
How to Design Impenetrable Airport Security by Wendover Productions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1kJpHBn50, 14 minutes, well researched)
Doesn't appear to have any downsides, appears to be logical, effective, and necessary. Appeals to emotion not withstanding.
If you have any good faith suggestions for improvement after watching this I'd be all ears.
After 9/11 the air industry needed to convince people it was safe to fly, and what better way to do that than to establish performative safety on the government's tab.
Go find an average cop, a CO, and a TSA employee. The CO is somewhere between a violent felon and the cop (and is technically probably both). The TSA employee is closer to a DMV employee than a cop. The border/customs agents are cops and they act like it.
For those not familiar it’s a keychain multi-tool. Mine had scissors. But it also has a really short blade. It’s sharp but really small. No worse than knitting needles..
https://www.leatherman.com/micra-20.html
I usually carry on my slr camera and lenses. And they poke through my bag. One time they detected something. So the tsa agent is asking me about something metal and T shaped. But they won’t let me near my bag. It was a portable microphone. I remember the agent checking my bag holding it up to the scanner persons and yelling, “it’s a microphone”
That's exactly what going through the security checkpoint at the airport is. A pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security.
Yes, arbitrary liquid thresholds and similar rules are more about giving airport security tools to remind travelers "who is charge", but it's all part of security theater at a more meta level.
The last few times I've been I bought fast pass to skip the ridiculous queues at security.
The first I went through TSA with an avalanche probe and collapsible shovel, they didn't stop me, so I thought it was allowed. On the way back they did and I had to rush check it
But to your point, it’s terrible. They basically screen you, then you sit in glass enclosed area, with no toilets and you cant bring liquids in, but there are water fountains.
So if you have to use the bathroom you have to leave, then go through security again. Or if there is a gate change, you have to go through security again.
It creates more problems than it solves.
Terminal 4 does it the normal way with screening before you reach the departure area. They also have scanners where you can leave your laptop in your bag.
Much better.
I guess for a hub like Singapore it might also make it easier to adjust checks done for different destinations?
So passenger flying out of Singapore can mix with people in transit. Therefore, putting the scanner before boarding prevent a possible terrorist attack when someone smuggle in explosive or what not from Singapore or from transit flight.
Heathrow as a major transit hub also doesn’t do security checks at the gate, rather it’s when you enter airside. Far better.
Singapore and KL airports are the odd ones out. I suspect because they were built before the security rules required better separation of departing and arriving passengers, and retrofitting the added security paths made less sense financially than just doing checks at every gate.
Yeah, this is what I've actually never seen in Europe. They mostly just expect you to pack everything back up quickly and tend to be annoyed if it takes some time. Which it usually does because I have to collect my belongings from several trays, some of which may have gone to additional checks, so they don't all come back together.
In Germany I never seen so many people have to open the bags after the scan, and have them re-scanned.
I understand how someone who has been inconvienced might perceive it differently but that in and of itself is by design and "priced in" as the goal is not to make 100% of travelers feel good but rather keep 100% of travelers safe.
All policies are fine as long as they only hurt Arabs and Arab-sympathizers (which are just synonyms for "terrorist").
Thank goodness policies like these never hurt Jews when applied in reverse.
For example, one of the questions asked is "did you pack your own suitcase?"
They aren't going to search your suitcase because of your race. That would be bad. It is bad not because of touchy feely reasons but rather because it isn't optimally effective.
They search based on a far more sophisticated probabilistic threat model based on real world data. All the questions and the way they are asked have logic behind them. It works.
Does that answer your indignation noises?
How you justify racial profiling, only show that you are completely clueless to what it's like being racially profiled ALL the time.
Incorrect. Betwee 2006 and 2010, seven people were convicted in the uk for conspiring to attack passenger airplanes with liquid explosives (acetone peroxide according to wikipedia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
That was one group, thirteen years ago, and since then everyone is limited to 100ml? Forever?
“Nobody knows who stabbed who, and we can't even get up to business class right now 'cause nobody can breathe.” - Betty Ong, Flight 11
Not necessarily explosive, but tactical chemical attacks have been a known capability for a while, and part of anti-terrorist training long before 2001. Something truly sophisticated from a superpower state would likely escape detection, (and therefore likely implicate such a state,) but the Tokyo Sarin attack by a cult in 1995 involved big bags of liquid.
(This isn’t a justification of any particular security search, just pointing out that liquid agents are not a non-existent threat.)
100ml of mace would be enough though, right? So why the limit?
Also why is liquid a special category? That doesn't make sense either.
Made me wonder how paste-like something has to not count as a liquid to them. Playdough?
How closely do they look at deodorant? Some stick-form ones are more liquid than toothpaste is.
It sounds like you are under the impression that people are being inconvenienced simply out of spite or due to the discretion of some unfriendly TSA-type airport employee - nope. Understandable why you would perceive things as such but the reality is very different, there is quite a lot going on, before you even board the plane, that you don't see. Places where it really matters, like Israel, cannot afford to engage in security theatre, it is all derived by logic.
How it works as is explained in great detail in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1kJpHBn50
Appeals to emotion mean nothing to me. I get that it feels bad and don't particularly care as being blown up feels worse, promise. If after watching that you have pragmatic improvements to suggest I am all ears. It completely addresses your point, in fact it even explains how this approach probably doesn't scale to larger airports/other-countries.
Somehow, it's mostly accepted that making it harder to intentionally kill oneself is not the right way to stop people from committing suicide. Yet at the same time, we still consider this total war on drugs the correct approach to preventing people from killing themselves with drug abuse. The sibling comment is right.
Alcohol is legal, how does it follow that there should be more iterations of addictive substances that do more damage to the fabric of society?
Isn't, at all. Something not being easily available makes it more attractive and makes people more curious about it. Such is human psychology.
Prohibition of anything for which there's demand does not work. It can't work. In general, laws only work when the majority of the society is on board with them. If the only people who are willing to enforce a law are police officers, then such a law only works when there's a police officer nearby.
> Alcohol is legal, how does it follow that there should be more iterations of addictive substances that do more damage to the fabric of society?
Again, if there's demand, there will be supply, regardless of legality. And since there will be supply of addictive substances either way, it makes sense to legalize them. The legalization will remove the criminal element from the cost, making it significantly cheaper, and would also ensure high quality/purity. I see no downsides here.
Things that cause drug abuse, especially the most harmful ones, are:
* lack of education. This was sometimes on purpose, with drug companies lying to get people hooked on opioids
* poverty and despair in general
* mental health
* many other things
Those can and should be fought, and they are a lot more effective than policing overall, and also a lot cheaper.
It's more common to find people who start addictions from a financially stable position where they have some discretional income. Rarely do people begin addictions where they have to decide between food or a drug they're not addicted to.
From the very beginning the American war on drugs was motivated by racism. It’s just another state-organized genocide in disguise.
The x-ray scanners usually have bold signs on them instructing you how to opt out. But if you do, they act as slowly as possible to ensure you never do it again.
Yeah... The thing is that you can't. Not easily.
You can't do much with a liter of some liquid that won't happen by chance on the way to the airport. And you can't change the liquid a lot while on the plane. You can barely fit seated there.
Now, what I do know is that pouring liquids together in a largers plastic bag is very easy, you can do that inside a backpack. I had to do this multiple times due to leaky milk bottles, leaky shampoo bottles, etc. The plastic bag simply has to be strong enough to stay in form while filling up.
Hence my point that this 100mL limitation is useless (from a volume limitation point of view), and I assume (not an expert on explosives) that if there was a limitation at 100mL, there must be something dangerous enough above this volume. Hence the overall regulation is useless.
Hope it clarifies my reasoning.
You can't make a strong explosive in a portable plastic bag. If you get the chemistry right, you will just burn yourself and maybe your neighbor. You won't even lose fingers, that requires better conditions. AFAIK, that's exactly what happened to the original liquid bomber, that was caught after he burned himself mixing things on the bathroom. In much more stable conditions than a bag, but still not nearly stable enough.
The guy that tried to carry solid explosives on his underwear was also caught only after he burned himself, because that's also not a practical way to carry them. As did the guy that tried to carry them on his shoes.
There are some very robust reasons why all those plots are doomed to failure, but those are the ones the US focus on (and basically impose on the rest of the world), while there are many perfectly viable vulnerabilities to exploit that nobody wants to close because they would impose more restrictions on the passengers. And that nobody is exploiting because it requires knowing what to do, and people that know what to do aren't normally prone to killing random strangers.
Can you cite a period when drug enforcement was more successful causing increased consumption?
>Again, if there's demand, there will be supply, regardless of legality. And since there will be supply of addictive substances either way, it makes sense to legalize them. The legalization will remove the criminal element from the cost, making it significantly cheaper, and would also ensure high quality/purity.
What do you think of the results in places that have attempted various versions of this? SF, Denver, parts of Canada, they all meet a similar result. Do you think the British were the good guys in the Opium Wars?
Well, then the rule is even more stupid than I thought =)
But all of this is a tangent to the 'war on drugs' which doesn't even begin to address the issue sensibly.
Now arguably those were international flights into the US. You could argue that security was lax abroad but generally TSA regulations and technical requirements apply to security screenings for inbound flights so there’s not any particular reason to believe that the TSA would have done a better job.
When travelling to the US we get subjected to random/targeted searches in the gating area by US TSA staff before being allowed to board.
This is after our own typical screening and scanning.
The second biggest thing that stopped them since 9/11 is passenger awareness that they could just... Not let a few assholes with boxcutters fly a plane into a building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#20...
- before 9/11, the advice was: sit down in your seat and wait for the ransom demands
- after 9/11: fight for your life now or die in a blaze of fire
Personally, I'd expect the decrease to be mostly attributable to increased cockpit access security like locked reinforced doors.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...
> Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft hit a mountainside.
Passengers figure out it's not a hijacking they might survive, and that you're going to crash the plane into a valuable target. Then, having nothing to lose, they revolt and ruin your plan.
So that particular type of plan isn't going to work again. Passengers no longer assume "hijacking I might survive".
Though it was the airline's own additional airport security check rather than the security checkpoint.
But questions like “why aren’t more people sacrificing their lives to hijack or destroy airplanes for the last 20 years” are not answerable by “sources”.
Do you have some reason to think a different posture towards hijackers and better security around cockpits didn’t have a strong effect on would-be hijackers’ willingness to give their lives to a violent political statement?
> In response to the incident and the circumstances of the co-pilot's involvement, aviation authorities in some countries implemented new regulations that require the presence of two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times. Three days after the incident, the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a temporary recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two crew members—including at least one pilot—were in the cockpit for the entire duration of the flight. Several airlines announced that they had already adopted similar policies voluntarily. But by 2016, the EASA stopped recommending the two-person rule, instead advising airlines to perform a risk assessment and decide for themselves whether to implement it. Germanwings and other German airlines dropped the procedure in 2017.
I guess the underlying assumption is that the regular medical tests that pilots are subjected to should keep pilots capable of mass murder-suicide out of a cockpit. Indeed, Lubitz had been declared "unfit for work" by a doctor, but apparently the doctor trusted Lubitz himself to pass this on to his employer, because "medical secrecy requirements prevented his physician from making this information available to Germanwings".
- the end of the cold war, with the clear hegemony of the US which halted state-sponsored terrorism from unaligned-but-socialist-minded countries (especially Libya)
- targeted assassination of terrorist leaders and infrastructures (no more training summer camps) no matter the country they are in (mostly through drones nowadays), leading to a progressive reduction in sophistication in terror attacks committed, and the rise of lone wolfs instead of structured terrorist commandos.
Now if you attempt to hijack a plane 100-300 passengers will beat your ASS and stop you before you get anywhere near control of the aircraft.
There will never be another hijacking attack where the pilot loses control of the plane from a threat of a would be hijacker.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-ai...
(...But logically and intuitively everything I just said is extremely stupid because by that logic 12.01 counts as "dozens" and that's ridiculous, so your complaint is absolutely correct and I agree with you 100%)
I'd argue that "dozens" obviously means there are a multiple of 12.