Saturday, 21 May 2016

On alert


Diva and TSH arrived at John Lennon airport with plenty of time to spare. Time for a breakfast to supplement the fruit they had at home. TSH had a bowl of porridge (saving himself for the cruise).  The airport is small, so hardly any queueing for check-in or security. Almost time to go to the gate. And then. ‘Will all passengers go immediately to Gate 1. This is a security incident’.  So people (except the ones who sat around drinking coffee ignoring it all) gathered in a small area inside the terminal with no officialdom in sight. If there was a ‘device’ around this did not seem good.  The next move was about ten minutes crammed into a small corridor. No place of work would carry out an evacuation like this. There were no announcements and many people were uneasy about being cooped up in a small space with an unknown threat present. And then to the departures hall and through security again. The automatic gates which scan the boarding cards would not let people back in so everybody had to be rechecked manually by – at first – one person. No proper queue, just a scrum. And then they started calling particular flights and those people had to push through.
TSH spoke to a policeman and was told that the airport had discovered that a scanner (or scanners?) was not working so everybody had to go back through security.
JL airport did the right thing in a very clumsy way.  And they are supposed to verify scanners regularly.
Eventual take-off was about an hour late.



No comments:

Post a Comment