Dave's Bit Bucket

Saturday August 25, 2007

Airport security, Dutch-style

Last Tuesday, I had to go to Amersfoort for the day, for a customer meeting. Now that I'm officially signed-off to fly (regular readers will know I have Deep Vein Thrombosis right now), the plan was to drive to Heathrow and fly to Schiphol, from where the customer's account manager had kindly offered to drive me to the meeting and back.

Everything went according to plan, and a useful and productive meeting was had; we came up with 5 possible ways to solve the customer's problem (of varying costs, complexities and likely accreditabilities), and the customer now has a small write-up of them all, for consideration.

When I got back to the airport, I was very pleasantly surprised to see how the Dutch airport security system worked. It's worth a "compare and contrast".

At Heathrow (and every other major international airport in the UK), you go through the front door, and are faced with a "ground side" area containing check-in desks, shops, cafes etc. At any point before your flight, you can go "air side" by presenting your passport and boarding pass for inspection, and then joining the (usually long) queue for the security arches and hand luggage scanners. While queuing, I usually take the opportunity to transfer all the metal I have about my person (other than belt buckle and glasses) into my jacket, so that it can all go through the scanner that way. Laptops have to come out of bags and be scanned separately, shoes have to be scanned, and containers of liquids have to be scanned (and there's the usual thing about bottles being <100ml, etc).

Once you're through to "air side" proper, there are more shops (usually more upmarket than on ground side, expecting folk to take advantage of duty free offers), cafes, plenty of seating, etc. Any purchases you make here, get sealed in transparent plastic bags and franked with an authenticity stamp. When it's time to go to your gate, you take your hand luggage and go; the only further check performed is when you present your boarding pass to board the aircraft.

(While it's not particularly on-topic, I was unsurprised to see that the IRIS biometric enrolment station was out of service owing to technical faults.)

At Schiphol, things are a little different - and in several ways, much better.

As you'd expect, once you're through the front door, you have "ground side" facilities. However, on moving to notionally "air side", all that happened was that I had to present my passport and boarding pass - and there I was, in an environment which looked like a very Dutch version of a British "air side" (hint to fellow travellers: the mini-Rijksmuseum in Terminal 2 is a lovely place to kill a little time, if you have some to spare). When the overhead signs told me to go to my gate, I did - and that's where I found the security arches and bag scanners.

I think that this approach is so much more elegant than the British approach, for the following reasons:

• true "air side" - the area between the arches and the aircraft door - is much, much smaller, and folk are in it for a much shorter length of time; it would be very much harder at Schiphol for ground staff with air-side clearance to smuggle something to a passenger, or vice versa
• security arches scale with the number of gates - add more gates, you get more arches with them (thus reducing the infamous 2-hour security queues you get at Heathrow rush hour, owing to the inability to expand the centralised arch numbers)
• different security procedures can be employed as required by destination countries, on a per-flight basis (eg shoe and liquid checks, or not, as required)

So, BAA, how about following this example?

Also, again slightly off-topic, while the Dutch equivalent of IRIS (called Privium, and apparently in use since 2001) located at Passport Control appeared to be working, I didn't see anybody use it.

(2007-08-25 09:58:49.0) Permalink Comments [1]