Furious passengers are facing hours-long queues to get through security after the airport installed a new technology which allows people to travel with liquids up to two litres.
www.dailymail.co.uk
The Daily Mail along with many other national newspapers are running with a story about the queue situation at Birmingham airport. They say the airport is blaming confusion due to the change in security liquid rules.
Also in a major admission of failure the airport now says it is unable to predict queue times.
I am assuming the 6 weeks Barton was referring to is to coincide with the full opening of the new
security hall. Not sure what else it can be unless someone has more information.....
Looking at this queue, it has gone through terminal 1, past arrivals and M&S, then outside, headed
back towards arrivals, then uturned back up to the Hilton..........one question immediately springs to
mind is will all of those passengers fit in the new security hall ? Looking at that picture I would say definitely not, so there will still be queues on the ground floor at least in 6 weeks time......also, we have not even reached peak passenger throughput yet......you can probably add another 10% volume on from mid July.
Imagine arriving by rail and now having to join the back of that queue after walking past security......awful customer experience.
I was trying to work out what is happening volume wise. The article Ray posted the other day stated that the new security set up throughput was 4000 per hour. Current nightstoppers of about 40 aircraft, average of 200 per flight - 8000, so spread over 2 - 3 hours departure window, there should not be a problem processing this number through security at 4000 per hour.
Are the airport just making it worse by asking people to arrive earlier.....are all scanners open/working during peak.....and maybe the crux of the issue, are they getting the 4000 throughput per hour....I suspect that is the issue more than anything else.
I believe there are 8 scanners, happy to be corrected on that, so 4000/8=500/60=8.333.......so each scanner has got to process just over 8 passengers a minute to hit the 4000, or one every 7.5 seconds.
Not experienced it myself yet, but that seems very ambitious to achieve hour after hour.
I wonder if anyone is checking the volumes they are actually processing per scanner per hour......if they are not hitting the 4000 or so on a consistent basis, all of the calculations and assumptions they have made will be wrong, and they will need to re-evaluate quickly and as i mentioned the other day, plan for getting more scanners asap.
It makes you wonder what sort of throughput analysis and calculations they have gone through if they are coming out with quotes like they 'cant predict the queue times'......as the passenger says in the article......you know the passenger volumes and the capacity, you should be able to work out the queuing times.......I know there is the variable about how long before a flight people will actually turn up, but I actually think people are panicking and turning up way too early which is just making things worse.
I suspect management are beginning to panic a bit, that quote today seemed a bit of rabbit in a headlines quote......I really hope the 6 week figure improves things, but unless you are magically going to get people quicker through the scanners, not sure how it is going to get better.
More Social Media posts today of people moving their flight from BHX to EMA.
At least Blues now have a new manager
