Security Crackdown?

[Wanderer]

My gf paid me a short visit over this weekend, she's a Russian National on a UK student visa on placement in Berlin.

I dropped her off at the airport today and the queues to departures through security were horrendous today. Normally it's fairly easy but here we had two snaking queues into the shopping mall bit. I asked and all I got was it was higher security.

At checking we had unbelievable hassle, my gf's passport being scoured, scanned, checked against a book with long lists of close type in it, with the supervisor, assured it was all ok, scoured again, supervisor again, eventually after about 30 mins given our boarding pass. Her passport is a bit of a struggle, with numerous UK and EU visa and Residence Permits in it, but we got the impression everyone was being very cautious.

I've haven't had chance to ask how passport control went....

So, maybe Manchester isn't a place to sneak out of the UK from now....

[stedman]

The queues for security are also horrendous at the London airports but the trick is to check in online, print out a boarding pass and luggage tag and use the fast bag drop - that's what we do everytime now and I cannot remember the last time I checked in the normal way (sometime last year but have flown a dozen times since then)

[Wanderer]

The queues for security are also horrendous at the London airports but the trick is to check in online, print out a boarding pass and luggage tag and use the fast bag drop - that's what we do everytime now and I cannot remember the last time I checked in the normal way (sometime last year but have flown a dozen times since then)

We checked in our hand luggage as hold baggage so we had nothing at all - yet we still had to queue to go airside via security check.

Also we used jet2.com - for the last time, they want 15 Euro to do the fast checkin thing...

Also it was 10 quid per item of hold luggage, we're staying with Lufthansa I think, or, as my mate's grandmother rather unpolitically correctly call them, 'Luftwaffe'.....

Der Krieg ist verlören.....or sth....