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An airport observation or two
On old friend once said he would never join an airline club which would take him away from the public areas of airports and into the sanctuary of a lounge. People-watching, he claimed, entertained him during those long waits when planes were delayed or there were hours to fill in, and he may be right. As we sat at London’s Gatwick airport waiting for our delayed Malev Airline flight to Budapest, we discovered where those groups of young people come from who travel abroad for pre-wedding stag and hen parties. We had seen them in Dusseldorf, these groups of revelers, roaming from bar to bar, dressed alike in pre-nuptial uniforms, but hadn’t given much thought to their origin.
To an anthropological eye it would appear that they may be a UK species migrating through Gatwick, south to exotic places like Ibiza, Mallorca, Malaga, and Tenerife. Gaggles of young men or women typically identified by costumes and looking every bit like they are flying not only south but also into trouble. One group of young males which took our attention had bright yellow singlets, pink shorts and socks of different iridescent colours. Each of their singlets was adorned with a number and nick names like Goosey and Loosey (Donna and Blitzen?). They may have been heading into trouble but as one man behind us in the queue observed, probably the only real danger was to themselves. Interestingly there looked to be more female groups than males, although it would be fair to observe that some of the women looked more apprehensive than their male counterparts.
If there was a hint, however, that we are becoming travel weary, airports would be a dead giveaway. Not only can whole days be lost getting to and from airports, checking in and out, waiting, and transferring between flights, but security measures are becoming more and more absurd. Gatwick is the fourth London airport we have used since our May arrival and, in our view, the most frustrating. Given the interminable transport delays in London, we always allow a hefty margin to get to each airport (three hours usually as, aside from Heathrow, it generally takes around two hours from home to Stanstead, Luton or Gatwick). The drill is then that check-in opens two-hours from departure time, inevitably just in front of us will be someone who doesn’t have the right documentation as was the case for our flight to Hungary. With just two check-in attendants, one had a passenger it took more than twenty minutes to process. We waited impatiently.
But that is not the problem. The queue to get through immigration and security at Gatwick was about 100 people long (which can be bypassed on the purchase of an express security ticket, but we have discussed this appalling capitalization of the airport’s own inefficiency before) and it is stultifyingly laborious. Laptops out, belts off, everything out of pockets and, in some cases, shoes off as well. Security is one thing, but having insufficient staff to handle the through traffic is another.
There was a time when we thought that people who had checked in and missed flights were simply careless. It may be that this new phenomenon of delays being caused by airports having insufficient resources to handle their own security measures may be the reason so many passengers are being paged warned through public address systems that their flight may be leaving without them.