Security – Too Much Or Too Little?

Having recently returned from a holiday to Cephalonia in Greece which I have to say was wonderful, I was pretty shocked at the state of security at the airport or should I say lack of.  Picture the scene, a plane load of people from Newcastle, waltz right through passport immigration without really showing your passport, just getting a nod from the policeman! Joking apart I know were from Newcastle but I would have thought our passports would have been checked.

Same on the return. Stand in a very long queue, passport vaguely looked at, proceed to the other bit, put your bag in the scanner and walk through the detector, bob’s your uncle straight through!  How lovely you may add, and believe me I don’t want to have to stand in a long queue with little or no air con but in this time of heightened terrorist activities in the world I would have thought it would have been perhaps, a bit more!  It was laughable really, people were just walking through the scanner with it bleeping all the time, and no one even bothered to look up. Okay, these people were probably staff but even so you have to be vigilant don’t you?

So, this got be thinking about other airports in Europe and elsewhere, what are they like.  I understand that Cephalonia is a holiday destination but so are places like Athens, – is that airport as bad? I would not think so.  Not surprised to see that Sharm El Sheik in Egypt has a really bad record of security however, very surprised to see a report about Chicago been bad. Really?? I have flown from Chicago a few times and found it to be very spot on, which is like most US airports I believe, however there is always one!

There has been a lot of research made by Skytrax on this very subject however, the bad airports or should I say “lack of security” ones are not really mentioned for obvious reasons. The good ones though? Well this is interesting.  Based on the best security screening they are – Seoul, Taiwan, Kansai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Chubu, Singapore, Copenhagen and Zurich.  No US airports mentioned and all but 2 are in the far east!

Perhaps one of the problems with “lack of” is there are not enough staff to cope with the amount of people at a airport? If this is the case, should they not be getting more!

I would love to hear what you all think.