US Homeland Security - a user experience

Flying to the US has now become a real pain.

On a recent trip - with Northwest Airlines - from Gatwick (London), the best part of two-and-a-half hours was taken up with a long chain of 'security' exercises at Gatwick itself, with a transfer at Detroit adding another one-hand-a-half hours of 'security'. I nearly missed my connecting flight.

That makes some four hours of 'security' on the outbound trip. I wonder how sensible many of the measures implemented really are. In total, on the way out I removed clothing at least seven times, my carry-on bag was searched by hand four times, scanned in its entirety seven times, and some of the individual items in it - e.g. a necklace - selected for individual scanning four times. Just what could I do with a necklace that I couldn't do with any trinket bought at the airport shops? And does it really make sense to subject passengers getting off one plane to the same rigmarole all over again before getting directly onto the next? After, all we've already been flying through US airspace.

I've always had an issue with that bizarre set of questions about whether you've been given a package by someone else. (This tradition seems to have been instituted by El Al in the 1970s, or at least that's when I first experienced it.) When was the last time a plane was blown up or hijacked by a complete innocent? The real questions are: Are you a terrorist? Do you have a bomb? But those are questions I've never been asked.

The US process doesn't seemed that well-designed. For example, a single pair of Northwest employees - working together - acted as a funnel before anyone got near the check-in desks at Gatwick. With this pre-check-in process taking anything up to 4-5 minutes per person in a considerable queue, the four check-in desk staff were left twiddling their thumbs for most of the time. Although US citizens seem fairly aware of the new procedures, those arriving from overseas are only informed that luggage locks will be broken after they have been, with a leaflet inserted in the offending suitcase. Sitting in a plane at Detroit, I saw a number of suitcases with clothes tumbling out onto the tarmac as broken closures failed to cope with tightly-packed possessions.

Individuals who seem to have been particularly targetted - iris scanning and fingerprint, broken cases and damaged clothing, as occurred to one colleague of mine - are not happy people. That there seems to be - in my experience, based on a small sample of individuals - selection for some procedures on the basis of ethnic origin is somewhat disturbing.

Any system is only as good as the people who operate it. When I fly out of Bilbao - an airport with a number of international flights - it's rare to see any staff even looking at the scan monitor: they are generally chatting with each other. And this in a city that has lived with terrorism for decades. Whether items are detected during scanning is more down to human factors than technological capabilities. Perhaps there should be more attention focused on getting up to a basic level of security at all airports, rather than going to ridiculous lengths at a few.

The official US Visit (Homeland Security) site.

The only place I've tracked down information on luggage locking policy is this obscure - for the overseas visitor - US transportation website. None of this information was provided prior to departure by Northwest Airlines or anyone else. Nor does the Northwest website pages devoted to baggage have any information on this.