Not quite like de Botton.....

Just back from overseas, visiting family in London with a side trip with them to Istanbul. All very enjoyable notwithstanding the customary hazards of modern international air travel, notably airport chaos/ inefficiency and the brusqueness of (most) UK border protection officials.

Earlier this year Alain de Botton spent a week in the employ of the British Airports Authority as a writer in residence at Heathrow Terminal Five. He's just published his diary, which is a characteristically fluent distillation of his week, which is one a long way removed from my and, I expect, most other airport users' experiences. That said it's worth reading, if only for the very different perspective he brought to his task. He must have been almost the only person with time to reflect about the terminal: everyone else was of necessity focused on a particular task: travelling (departing or arriving), security, selling (a big, big part of modern airport life) or maintenance.

I may have more to say about this topic later....

Shambolic security

The Australian asks more questions about the deficiencies in airport security revealed by events at Sydney Airport:

Why were police notified of the deadly bikie brawl only after receiving a 000 call from a member of the public?

Given the density of closed-circuit television cameras scattered throughout the airport terminal - supposedly one of Australia's most secure - why did the first police officers arrive after the 15-minute brawl was over and most of the attackers had fled?

And, crucially, why were no police on hand at gate five to escort the bikies away as they arrived off a Melbourne flight? It's now known Qantas cabin crew had expressed concern about the potential for strife during the flight to Sydney.

Respected security analyst Alan Behm thinks he has some answers. There was a security failure on Sunday; a man was killed at the airport, he says. But deploying more police to the airport is simply a knee-jerk reaction to a more complex problem, Behm tells The Australian.

Airport security at Sydney and most other capital cities across Australia is geared to prevent an act of terrorism on board a plane, he says. It all depends where you want to put the focus of your security measures: on the air side of the passenger security screening barrier or the public concourse.

"I think the solution really is to maximise the protections you've already got with the (screening) barriers by having the police on the air side rather than the public side, if not apprehending, then intervening, before those thugs got on to the public concourse after getting off the plane," Behm says.

Security protocols for an aircraft captain to radio ahead and warn of an onboard incident exist, which raises concerns about why this was not put to good effect on Sunday.

"It's a question of whether the message was put into that system. Did the purser say to the aircraft captain, 'We have a potential issue here, could you warn security?' I suspect not," Behm says.

There are suggestions police should have apprehended the bikies in the passenger departure area, but this would have posed a serious danger to the public.

"Police can't just get their weapons out and start shooting. They can't go throwing tear gas and stuff around, and even if the police went up against 12 blokes wielding these big steel bars, there's every chance they would have got beaten s--less."

Behm and fellow terrorism expert Clive Williams, of Macquarie University, agree with Keelty that police response times, on being notified of the incident, were acceptable. But it is unrealistic to expect unarmed Qantas security staff to intervene in a bikie brawl, Williams says.

At least one Qantas security official did have the presence of mind to record the numberplates of taxis departing with fleeing gang members, he says.

"He did the right thing. The police arrived essentially after these people (bikies) had fled," Williams says.

"The problem with this bikie violence is that the kind of violence these police at the airport are trained for is terrorism related and not so much gang violence. Obviously there's going to be a need to look at bikie violence more generally, not only in an airport context but the kinds of activities they are engaging in nationally, where there are wars going on between their factions."

.....

Concerns about security at Sydney airport are not new. In 2005 Allan Kessing, a former Customs airport security officer at Sydney airport, was convicted for leaking a highly damaging report about serious security breaches to this newspaper. The report dealt with a range of security concerns including the criminal records of baggage handlers, luggage theft and drug trafficking.

His actions spurred the Howard government to implement a far-reaching probe into airport security, the Wheeler report, which resulted in more rigorous security measures being implemented across the country.

But the bikie brawl has again raised concerns that more needs to be done.

AFP officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say one area requiring immediate attention is better agreement on airport policing functions involving the AFP and their NSW Police counterparts.

"State police don't want to listen to advice from the AFP; they want to run their own race," one AFP source tells The Australian.

While the AFP has prime responsibility for security at Sydney airport, that does not include the monitoring of the CCTV cameras, a state police role.

The issue of agreement on police roles is a problem, says former Sydney Airport Corporation chief executive Tony Stewart. The AFP believed its main role was counter-terrorism, while NSW Police focused on other areas of crime, he told ABC radio.

"The weak link is the demarcation between whether this was an anti-terrorism incident or a crime incident and somebody was probably looking at the rule book, saying it's the other guy's problem," he said.

In his first comments on the airport violence, Kevin Rudd yesterday pledged "zero tolerance" for bikie crime.

"This sort of behaviour by bikies and others engaged in organised criminal activity is unacceptable in Australia, absolutely unacceptable," the Prime Minister said soon after arriving in Washington, DC. State and commonwealth attorneys-general would discuss a co-ordinated response to the bikie menace at their next meeting, he promised.

Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus says the federal Government has ordered an investigation into the adequacy of the AFP's response on Sunday in addition to a national audit of police officers deployed at airports.

More deficiencies in airport security exposed

Yesterday's attack at Sydney Airport has, apart from alarming many people , predictably produced a rapid response announcement of a review into procedures:

The NSW Police Gang Squad has been more than doubled and the Australian Federal Police have launched a review after a man was bludgeoned to death in front of horrified passengers in a gang attack at Sydney Airport yesterday.

Four men will face court this afternoon charged with affray after the 29-year-old western Sydney man was repeatedly pummelled in the head with a metal pole, used to keep passengers in line during check-in, at the domestic terminal.

Police say the brawl started when motorcycle gang members flew into Sydney from Melbourne and were met by members of a rival gang about 1:30pm yesterday.

Witnesses say security staff and police were slow to act as the brawl between at least 15 rival bikies spilled from the airport's secured section into the check-in area, where they bashed each other with poles in front of up to 50 witnesses.

The buckpassing has already begun:

Despite the attack generating headlines internationally, Sydney Airport Corporation, which owns and operates the airport, says the attack is nothing to do with them and has referred any questions to Qantas.

Qantas is offering counselling to staff who witnessed the attack but is otherwise happy with how its security staff dealt with the brawl.

Both organisations point to the Australian Federal Police as responsible for overall law enforcement.

Of the media comments I've read so far today's Crikey editorial (subscription required) has summed up one of the major issues forthrightly and succinctly:

If one thing is proven beyond doubt by the bikie brawl at Sydney airport it is that the gestures of the past decade toward airport security are nothing more than a highly expensive, inconvenient public relations posture.

Ever felt like this?

Great piece by Garrison Keillor on Salon.com about the perils of passing through modern airport security (with some asides on other matters).

While he's perhaps best known for his folksy style Keillor often writes with a pithy acerbity which adds bite to his trenchant comments. Example:

[W]hen I went through airport security in Minneapolis on Monday, it was an object lesson in something -- a line of a hundred people twisted around in the cattle chute, 16 men and women in the white TSA shirts with the epaulets, an obese young woman shouting at us to take our laptop computers out of our cases in a voice she learned from a prison camp movie; one metal detector in operation, two closed, and the guardian of this narrow gate was a man who carefully read each boarding pass as if proofreading it for misspellings, though it had already been checked by his colleague at the head of the line.

.....

The line inched along, four supervisors stood watching blankly, the fat lady barked, the gentleman operating the scanner was very jittery about shaving kits and computer batteries and needed to have every other bag checked, and in the lifetime it took to go through, you started to sympathize with all the Republicans who've complained about government inefficiency over the years, except it is a Republican administration that runs this operation, but never mind. Details, details.

I wanted to tell the shirts not to treat us with such extravagant contempt, but you should be careful about mouthing off to people who have the power to detain you and order a body search.

And also it seemed to me that I was the only one in line who was grinding my teeth. Everyone else was quite chipper, as if they were heading off on the class trip to Excelsior Amusement Park. So if I had spoken up and the shirts had thrown me to the ground and Maced me and stuffed me into a holding cell to await arraignment under the Patriot Act, I doubted that anyone would've come to my defense. They would've figured I must have had a shoe bomb on me or something.

I wish that I could express myself half as well as Mr Keillor.

Update 2 May

Two articles from today's Australian discuss, apparently unwittingly and without matching the elegance of his prose, some of the issues explored by Garrison Keillor.

Steve Creedy writes of the pressure to cut long airport queues for quarantine inspections, while Natalie O'Brien and Peter Wilson draw attention to other deficiencies which they perceive in the security measures in place at Australian airports, notably Brisbane and Perth.

"The quality of travellers is better at the back end of the plane"

In The Weekend Australian former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie writes whimsically about his journey across the Pacific and the US in economy class.

Extract:

I really didn't think it was that funny to be honest but I smiled politely as I desperately tried to force my carry-on luggage into the overhead bin above seat 50H in the bowels of economy class on the Brisbane to LA flight QF175.

"What no more first or business class?" chuckled a friendly Australian of Indian descent, who seemed far too pleased with himself. The woman next to him across the aisle was even more direct: "Why are you down here?" I thought that was self-evident so I just kept smiling like some deranged idiot until the last of my luggage was finally safely in place.

But as I sat down she wouldn't let it go, "Don't ex-premiers get first and business class travel for life?" she inquired. She was about my age and pleasant enough so I ever so politely explained that ex-premiers did not get free air travel for life, secretly wishing for the first time ever that we did. But since I was the fool who had banned such travel I was in no position to complain.

"The quality of travellers is better at the back end of the plane," I stated bravely. They seemed particularly pleased with that idea and I was equally pleased they didn't ask when was the last time I travelled economy. The truth was it has been a little while since I travelled either out of the government jet or the pointy end of the plane and since their taxes had been paying for both the least I could do was to take their gentle Australian ribbing on the chin. So I did.

The pointy end of QF175 may have been full but there were plenty of spare seats where the "quality passengers" were. So my new travelling mates told me that as soon as we took off we should divide up the empty seats for maximum comfort. "We will end up with more room that those buggers in business class at a fraction of the cost," my new best mate said in his clear Australian-Indian accent. And he was right...

I must try to emulate Mr B and be more stoic about long distance flights; but it would be good to acquire the secret of how he managed to get a whole row of seats to himself on a Qantas trans-Pacific flight.

More on airport security

The First Post, reviews Unsafe at any Altitude ,a book recently published in the USA, which discusses aspects of US airport security, its excesses and omissions. These include

• security staff who are themselves not subject to screening of any form when they come on duty
  
• errors in "no fly" lists
  
• the refusal of intelligence agencies such as the CIA to provide information to airport security staff about people they have under surveillance (with the consequence that many of them are allowed to fly).

No doubt many of these shortcomings are replicated in Australia, though here it seems to be more difficult to get information about such matters than it is in the USA.

Business class traveller gripes

Today in The Australian Bernard Salt, who generally writes well on demographic matters, weighs into airlines (mostly Qantas) about delays in airport security check-ins and various other things. Initially, instead of (as I've tried to do) coming up with some constructive suggestions, his piece loses its way and lapses into a self-serving rant:

Waiting in line for 20 minutes simply to X-ray carry-on baggage is bad enough but this procedure is made all the more galling by the convention of allowing Qantas (and I assume other airline) staff to walk straight to the top of the queue. Their logic is, no doubt, that they travel almost every day and so they shouldn't have to wait in line with the plebs.

But what about people like me, business travellers paying business class margins, who travel 160 times a year. How does this frequency compare with a pilot's? And yet I am treated the same in the security queue as a once-a-year tourist!

To a thrice (or so) - a-year tourist like me this is red rag stuff. At the arrival end Mr Salt and his business class mates get out of the blocks first, so whatever they may lose on the swings of the departure queues they gain on the roundabouts of arrivals (provided that their baggage is delivered to the roundabouts in time - but that's another of his gripes) .

To be fair, he does get back on the rails later:

It strikes me that Generation Y staff, in particular, believe that if they apologise for a problem then that problem ceases to exist.

"You've been waiting in line for 15 minutes while we get our act together and summon extra staff to help with business class check-in?

"No worries, when you get to the counter I'll apologise for the delay and then we can both pretend that it never existed. And when you come back tomorrow and the same thing happens, I'll apologise again. And again."

Now I don't know whether this is me being picky, but if there's a problem, I don't want a rote apology - I want the problem owned and fixed.

Could someone in airline customer-service training please remove the instruction to offer "platitudinous but meaningless apologies" from the program, and replace it with "ownership of the problem".

My comments might be viewed by some as the end-of-year grumbles of a jaded traveller, and to some extent this might be true.

However, what the airlines need to know is that these complaints are discussed frequently among business travellers. Indeed, the jaunty ice-breaker to any business meeting these days is talking about how horrendous the flying and baggage-retrieval experience was. Everyone has an anecdote worthy of telling and retelling.

And the worst thing is that there seems to be no accountability for the incessant delays in the travelling process. Any complaint is invariably shrugged off with a "you wouldn't want us to skimp on security, would you?" To me, this seems to be the eternal excuse for slack service.

"Unsustainable, unnecessary and over the top"

Support for my views on delays at airports, or one reason for them, has come from an unexpected quarter :

One of the key advisers to John Howard during his prime ministership, Sydney Airport Corporation chairman Max Moore-Wilton, says Australia's "stupid" quarantine inspections are burdening international tourists with long delays and making them feel unwelcome.

Mr Moore-Wilton says the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service's (AQIS) target to screen 80 per cent of international visitors' luggage is "unsustainable, unnecessary and over the top".

"It's a problem that is getting worse and as more and more people come to Australia, the queues are going to get longer and longer," he told ABC radio's morning show in Sydney.

The former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet - who left his position in 2002 to join Sydney Airport Corporation - says the quarantine policy was introduced in 2001 to deal with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain.

Mr Moore-Wilton says the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service's (AQIS) target to screen 80 per cent of international visitors' luggage is "unsustainable, unnecessary and over the top".

"It's a problem that is getting worse and as more and more people come to Australia, the queues are going to get longer and longer," he told ABC radio's morning show in Sydney.

The former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet - who left his position in 2002 to join Sydney Airport Corporation - says the quarantine policy was introduced in 2001 to deal with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain.

"There is no current outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain or anywhere else that I'm aware of," he said. "We are applying a regime as if there is an immediate risk to Australia's biosecurity ...

"It's a mindless, not risk-assessment-based system."

He has told ABC 702 Local Radio in Sydney such stringent checks do not happen anywhere else in the world.

"There are literally hundreds of thousands of regular travellers, like me, going through Sydney that are treated every day as if they were a risk. That is stupid."

Mr Moore-Wilton believes tourists are becoming frustrated by long queues and the current regime needs reform.

"I'm asking for a risk-based assessment on a day-to-day basis by intelligent officials as to the risk of passengers threatening our biosecurity," he said.

But AQIS says strict baggage screening procedures at Sydney Airport are necessary to prevent the introduction of diseases.

AQIS spokesman Carson Creagh says diseases such as bird flu pose a constant risk to Australia.

"We are seizing around 12 tonnes of avian influenza risk material coming in simply through airports every year," he said.

"We can't afford to back away from inspection in that area."

Of course, as I've previously noted the problem is not confined to Sydney airport, nor to the quarantine people, though it worries me that Mr Creagh appears to believe that the best way to detect "avian influenza risk material" is to use the gung-ho rigorous approach to which both Mr Moore-Wilton and I take exception.

Instead of requiring almost all travellers to submit to luggage searches like the one I was subjected to at Adelaide Airport on 31 October (and which revealed nothing untoward) why not seek a bit more cooperation from the public, eg by providing more pre-arrival information to travellers so that they can, in a manner of speaking, separate their own grain from their chaff? Or would the challenge of translating "avian influenza risk material" into plain English, let alone other languages, be too much to ask of Mr Creagh and his offsiders?

"Airports are very stressful places for a lot of people"

So spake a Sydney magistrate who, as today's Australian reports, did not convict a university lecturer who pleaded guilty to two counts of assault and swearing in a public place (that's still an offence?) because she missed a Jetstar flight to Hervey Bay.

The magistrate expected a bucketload of criticism from the usual tabloid sources. I don't condone violence but I do think that the magistrate has a point and, moreover, that the authorities, by which I mean airline, customs/immigration/ quarantine , airport security and management, can do more to alleviate matters.

For starters:

1. Review processes with a view to speeding them up at both departure and (particularly for international flights) arrival .

This means, among other things:

• improving technology, eg x-ray equipment, to reduce/eliminate errors: on my recent trip transiting via Singapore (and not going out of the airport) I had to empty my carry on bag as the X-ray operators were adamant that I was carrying a small cutting instrument (I wasn't, but they wouldn't take my word for it).
  
• seeing that enough trained people are available to deal with the customers.

2. Provide passengers with as sufficient information as possible to help them go through departure and arrival formalities as smoothly as possible.

Suggestions:

• make information available as widely as possible and in a variety of media: online, print and, for inbound passengers, in the destination videos which are shown just before arrival.
• have clear instructions and signage throughout terminals.

If this sounds like I'm just being grumpy let me give a bouquet to the authorities at Heathrow, who seem to have, especially after the foiled bombing attempt at Glasgow airport, recognised that slow moving crowds of people in terminals can be a major security risk. My impression when I left this year was that the processing was still rigorous but that people didn't have to wait as long as has been the case in the past. By no means perfect (and the immigration counters for arriving non-British/EU citizens are understaffed - or perhaps on the morning when I passed through there were a few late arrivals ) but getting better.

In Australia the procedures at Darwin Airport were sub-standard: a long, slow moving queue stretched out of the terminal building into the tropical night, and the few instructions were bellowed out by the staff operating the x-ray machines (in a language which I, but not I imagine foreign passengers, just recognised as Australian English). Some of the staff came across as brusque and officious. Not a good way to welcome visitors and returning citizens.

Note: The version of this story printed in The Oz is longer than the online version linked to above.

Chaos at Perth airport

Here are some photos which I took at Perth airport on Monday during a baggage handlers' stoppage, or strike, as this ABC News item described it.

The photos show both a significant quantity of unattended baggage left lying around (there was even more elsewhere in the terminal) and the stoic resignation of many affected passengers, who from my observations, included several elderly people and at least one unaccompanied child.

The ABC report's comment: 'Qantas says it is disappointed with what it calls the "total disregard staff have shown to customers."' overlooks the inept handling of the customer/passenger aspects of the situation by Qantas management. The airline essentially washed its hands of responsibility for transit passengers like me, leaving us, once most flights east had been cancelled, to make our own arrangements for overnight accommodation. It should have been relatively easy for staff to conduct internet searches on behalf of the stranded passengers.

Several people purporting to be Qantas staff had no ID, while there were two queues at different points of the domestic terminal, one for rebooking cancelled flights, the other for baggage and other matters.

When I and several other Adeaide bound passengers had found accommodation the check in counter staff could not locate our checked baggage. They undertook to deliver it to where we were staying overnight but did not do so.

We were not offered an emergency pack (which includes a t shirt and unisex underpants) until the next day, when we returned to the airport to resume our journey.

Whatever the causes of the baggage handlers' action, passengers were treated abominably by the airline, mainly because there was no leadership or effective communication from Qantas management on the spot.

I hope that Qantas conducts a review into this schemozzle. I've contacted them and will wait to see how long it takes them to respond.