When you prepare for a long-haul flight you have to think carefully about what you are going to wear. In the course of your trip, you’ll probably have to take off your belt, strip off your outer clothing and remove your shoes a few times, especially if you are transiting through a third country before reaching your destination. It’s not the right time to wear that old pair of socks with the hole in the toe because you’ll be treading barefoot before a crowd of strangers. It is also a good idea to avoid lace-up shoes. The security checks introduced after Sept. 11 have changed the way we travel. No one disputes the need for increased security, and passengers are willing to undergo checks in order to travel as safely as possible. But the security measures in place don’t always make sense and it is not evident that they really make us more secure. Your nail clippers may be confiscated as a potentially lethal weapon, but wine is still served on board airplanes in glass bottles that could be infinitely more dangerous if broken into shards. And it is hard to understand why a bottle of water is confiscated at passport control, as it is done at Heathrow, but you can buy the same one a few meters beyond the gate and take it on board.
The fact that rules are not implemented in the same way at all airports further complicates matters. You can set off from İstanbul with a laptop case and a handbag, but once you reach Britain, where a strict one-bag policy applies, you’ll be forced to merge the contents of the two bags into one or face the risk of having some of your belongings confiscated if you want to get onto another flight. The same applies to duty free that you bought before departure at İstanbul airport.
Security is not the only issue. For private airport operators, keeping costs down is more important than keeping passengers happy. At Heathrow, for example, it is often the case that too few security stations are open. As a result, passengers end up having to queue. Last summer, when thousands of travelers were stranded in Britain by a terrorism scare, economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz calculated the cost of long delays at Heathrow. Based on the assumption that passengers earn 10 pounds an hour on average, he suggested that if each of them queued for an hour, the total losses accumulated by some 68 million people who pass through the airport yearly amounted to 680 million pounds.
Little of this burden is carried by the companies running the airports, which enjoy a monopoly. When airports are privatized the interest of operators and those of airlines -- not to mention passengers’ needs -- do not always coincide. A shortage of security staff is only one aspect of the issue. When travelers check in early because they fear long queues, they become a captive population of shoppers taking advantage of the numerous stores that have turned many airports into shopping malls. The operators, which collect the profits, have little incentive to reduce waiting time. In Britain airport operators BAA have even recently tested a specially mixed background soundtrack of bird song, which is said to induce passengers to spend more. The more time passengers spend in airports, the more operators earn. In the end, it is usually the airlines -- rather than airport managers -- that end up being blamed by frustrated travelers.
