Why is security screening done at the gate in some airports?

4/12/2017 1:20:06 AM

It has several benefits:

  • prevents ancillary staff like catering and shop workers from entering the secure area
  • stops large quantities of goods used by catering and shops, etc. from having to be screened (not to mention that catering staff will have knives and so on to do their work).
  • allows non-travellers to use the facilities, e.g. when seeing off their friends
  • in a small airport handling short-haul aircraft, it’s often actually quicker for passengers

I think the downsides for airports are that expensive screening kit needs to be duplicated and it possibly needs more staff.

8/6/2014 12:02:08 PM

Screening at the gate is done at a number of other major airports, including Singapore Changi, Kuala Lumpur International, etc. And it has one massive advantage from the airport operator’s point of view: you don’t need to separate arrivals and departures.

This means that instead of essentially duplicating all routes to the aircraft (one for passengers boarding, one for passengers disembarking) and maintaining security to ensure that nobody accidentally or intentionally slips from one route to the other, you can basically build one floor less. Given how large the average airport building is, this is a pretty significant saving. As an additional bonus, arriving passengers get to shop at all the same restaurants, bars, duty-free shops as departing passengers, which means the airport makes more money and doesn’t need to duplicate the duty-free shops either. Finally, as you note, this means you don’t need the special “transit screening” that you do need at split-level airports to allow passengers to move from the unsecured arrivals to the secured departures areas.

Also, handling security at each gate may seem a bit inefficient, but it actually provides massive maximum capacity advantages. If your screening is centralized, and you’ve got a lot of flights leaving at once, then your central security may get really badly backed up. I’ve waited in 500m+ security lines in Heathrow, which has central security and thus has to funnel everybody through that single point of failure, where they wait fuming, tweeting about how much they hate LHR. In Changi, problem solved: you just let people into departures, where they can shop, eat, drink and be merry, and screen them a few hundred a time at the gates.

As for disadvantages, the cost to the airport of maintaining all the redundant screening areas isn’t that huge, since the main cost of security is manpower, and each screening area is unattended when there are no flights using that particular gate. I can’t recall exactly how AMS is set up, but in SIN each set of security equipment in T1/T2 is typically shared by a gate or two, with T3 having semi-central security checkpoints each covering half a dozen gates or so.

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

About me

Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

Search Posts

Latest posts

Popular posts