the airport is not your friend
Air travel is a complicated affair. Before a flight has even taken off, the mind is plagued with a selection of the following: what time do I need to wake up? Uber or train to the airport? Suitcase or cabin bag? How many podcasts should I download? Eat at the airport, or eat on the plane? Given these burdens, it would be an act of great kindness if airports and airlines did what they could to ease the stress of travellers — many of whom are fleeing the stress of their daily lives to begin with. But no mercy is shown. If anything, air travel keeps getting more complicated, as a recent trip to Milan made clear.
My first grievance: the airport scanners. Those of you who have travelled out of Gatwick (or Heathrow) recently will be familiar with the term "the new scanners." These new scanners utilise the same technology as the CT scanners used in hospitals, and the Gatwick coffers were evidently flush enough to allow them to buy a few. Other European airports have not been so flush. Land anywhere else in Europe, where the old scanners are still in use, and a bottle of moisturiser still poses an existential threat to international aviation. What I have never understood about the 100ml liquid restriction is that nobody has ever explained why we continue pretending it makes any sense. Liquid explosives have never been used in any successful plane-related terrorist attack. We have spent two decades confiscating shampoo on the strength of a 2006 plot that never happened.
Grievance number two: the extortionate cost of food in Duty Free. Somewhere along the way, "duty free" ceased to mean "cheaper" and became shorthand for "available after security." Once you've surrendered your liquids, removed your belt, and demonstrated to a stranger that your laptop is, in fact, a laptop, a Pret sandwich inexplicably costs the same as a decent lunch in central London. The genius of the airport is that it turns otherwise rational adults into remarkably compliant consumers. You've already spent hundreds, if not thousands, on flights and accommodation, so an £8 bag of chocolate-coated almonds scarcely registers. And there are no alternatives. You're trapped in a shopping centre on the outskirts of London with a runway attached. There is nowhere else to go. Airports know exactly what they're selling: convenience to captive customers whose spending inhibitions have been softened by an early alarm clock and the vague excitement of foreign travel.
My third and final grievance is passport control. The EU — that great cathedral of bureaucracy — has recently rolled out its new Entry/Exit System, replacing the old passport stamp with a biometric register: fingerprints, facial scans, and a digital record of every crossing. On arrival in Milan, I scanned my passport at a gate and was met by an Italian official who asked what passport I was carrying. "British," I told her. She directed me to the purple queue. The purple queue led to a bank of computers, where I was asked to scan my passport again. Then came the questions: reason for visit, place of stay, who I was staying with, for how long. And finally, the request that gave the whole exercise its sinister edge — a full set of fingerprints. It was not a request I could decline; refusal meant the next flight home. I have no issue with being asked who I am or why I'm visiting. But the idea that a foreign government now holds a permanent biometric record of me because I fancied a few days of La dolce vita feels like a disproportionate exchange.
The uncomfortable truth is that none of these systems were built to serve the passenger; they were built to serve the pockets of some and the spreadsheets of others. Flying remains one of mankind's great achievements. The trouble is everything that happens between arriving at the airport and leaving it.