5 days ago
Is the end of the dreaded airport queue in sight? Not quite
Last week, British passengers arriving at Tenerife South Airport reported 'inhumane' conditions after queueing for more than two hours without access to water or loos.
'We couldn't move our arms, we could barely breathe, and people were sweating. Some parents lifted their children onto their shoulders to stop them from suffocating,' one passenger told local media.
It's a frightening image, and one that has become more common at European airports since British air passengers became 'third-country nationals' after Brexit. This effectively gives us the same rights as arrivals from, say, Venezuela, banishing us to the often snail-paced 'All Passports' queue to get a stamp on arrival.
When flying home we must also pass through border control to get a second exit stamp before proceeding to the gate. This can lead to scenarios where passengers are kettled at the gates with no access to refreshments if a flight is delayed, and no way to go back to the main terminal area.
A new deal
Change, it seems, is on the horizon. The Labour party has struck a deal with the EU to allow British passport holders to pass through e-gates, and the introduction of the Entry/Exit System (EES) in October will automate identity checks and remove the need for manual passport stamps.
So will these images of British passengers snaking out of arrival halls at European airports soon be a thing of the past? Yes, but it may take a while.
When it first rolls out, EES will require British (and all non-EU) travellers to provide fingerprints and facial images when entering or exiting the Schengen Area. This process has been much-delayed, not least because implementing it requires a continent-wide tech overhaul. And as we all know, airport IT systems, often operated by third-party firms and alongside multiple other systems, have a tendency to buckle at inopportune moments.
If the new tech doesn't create hold-ups, the data capture process could. Pressing thumbs on sensors and having a photograph taken may sound like a simple process, but how many times have you seen somebody push their passport into the e-gate sensor the wrong way up? Such are the fears of hold-ups that airports are planning 'safety valve' procedures, where the requirement to capture everyone's data will be temporarily waived if a checkpoint gets too busy.
On e-gates, I have found this new Labour/EU e-gates 'agreement' to be somewhat smoke and mirrors. The wording in the relevant document says that 'British passengers will be able to use more e-gates in Europe'. But this does not necessarily mean we will be able to use fast-track EU e-gates.
Instead, it might be that we remain in the naughty ('All Passports') queue that happens to have an e-gate at the end of it. This will ultimately be up for individual countries and airports to decide.
Additional hurdles
Perhaps I'm being overly negative. Let's say that the EES roll-out isn't as clunky as feared, and that through some miracle the majority of European airports do kindly allow Britons to use their fast-track e-gates. Surely the airport queues will have simmered down by next summer?
Maybe. But we will still face the additional border check when flying home, albeit with biometrics rather than a passport stamp. Even if e-gates are rolled out to British arrivals (as Faro Airport announced this week), we will still need to go to another booth afterwards to get our passports stamped by a human. And hold-ups like those seen in Tenerife are as much to do with poor scheduling as anything else.
I checked the arrivals board on Tuesday June 2, and at 10.40am there were scheduled flights from Manchester (Jet2), Liverpool (Jet2), East Midlands (Tui) and Bournemouth (Ryanair). Ten minutes later, flights from Birmingham and Leeds (both Jet2) were scheduled to land, plus another from Paris.
That's seven 180-or-so capacity flights touching onto tarmac, one after the other, in the space of ten minutes, at a single-runway, single-terminal airport. Even the sleekest, AI-powered biometric arrivals system would struggle to process all those passengers without the formation of a queue.
There are some changes to the airport process that we can feel optimistic about. Soon, we'll be able to take greater quantities of liquids through security at all UK airports.
A shake-up of UK flight paths promises to reduce air traffic delays before the end of the decade.
And yes, all this new tech will eventually reduce friction at borders. But when you are stuck in a packed arrivals hall with a child on your shoulders and no access to water, you will be praying for progress now – not at some ambiguous point in the future.
