The Airport Security Experience

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, millions of travelers head home to their relatives and friends to celebrate a day of overeating and not worrying about going nuts over those calories. These also include travelers coming from abroad like myself.

Heading to Newark (EWR) from London Gatwick (LGW) was not a problem. Security in London is a bit more lax since you are not required to take off your shoes/sneakers or take your laptop out of your backpack/briefcase. Of course, if you set the alarm off, you get light-wanded and padded down.

Immigration at Newark was messed up. I frankly do not know how they can arrange the queue that badly. The area has been widened the last time I was there but the counters for US citizens were arranged in a L-shaped configuration, and the security folks had trouble seeing over the crowd which lines needed filling. Instead of one main queue, create two lines for each side of the L-shape layout. It makes it easier to assign people to each line as they reach the end of the initial queue. Customs was quick. A glance at your blue form and you're through.

Compared to Atlanta and Cleveland, you do not go through a security x-ray when you land. It is really ridculous for the travelers to go through another security checkpoint after they have been on the plane for 8 hours. I don't think there's any trust there.

Leaving for London is always different. Airport security at Newark was long as usual. The initial queue was organized and there was a line for those that had Onepass Elite. A sign on the wall stated that you may not be needed to take off your footwear. Of course, a passenger in front of me was about to pass through the scanner, and the security guard barked at him to go back and take off his shoes. But her statement was not even helpful. "You are STRONGLY recommended to take off your footwear." How about "REQUIRED?" Please, if we want to make the process as smooth as possible, just tell us to take off our footwear right at the beginning. I personally wish they ended producing the metal strands in our shoes so we would not need to take them off. It kinda sucks if it was raining and the floors would be slippery and wet. Every person going through would have wet socks.

Of course, you need to take your laptop out of your bag, and your belt buckle too. All of these add unnecessary minutes to the line, but you would figure the technology is advanced enough where we do not have to worry about these things. A laptop bag should be easily x-rayed with the computer inside, don't ya think?

The funny thing I saw while in line is a gourmet service lady trucking a square cart of about 15-20 layers of bread. She has to take each layer apart and put the bread bags into the tray for it to be scanned. Let's see, 15-20 layers and there were probably 20 bags on each layer. So this woman had to put through almost 400 bags of bread through the x-ray. Not efficient at all.

Immigration in London was quick for those that had non-EU passports. A quick question about my employment status and I was through in less than two minutes. Customs was just quick as long you go through the green section. You still can get picked out of the crowd and security would ask you additional questions and check your bags.

What an experience! :)