Check this for incompetence

Check in online and save time at the airport, right? Not on 3-4 January at Terminal C, Newark, New Jersey.

The first time waster was an hour and a half in the queue to drop off our bags. My wife and I aren’t sure why it took so long because there was no official information. Maybe the airline was doing extra checks because of the recent attempted plane bombing in Detroit. Maybe the baggage belt was faulty: it only moved in short, occasional bursts. Maybe the staff were incompetent. We don’t know, because travellers were being told nothing.

Security was the next ‘entertainment’. By the standards of American airports in recent years, this particular passage through the security checks was normal: lots of shouting from blue-uniformed, gloved-up officials, ordering the contaminated, suspected masses how to far to disrobe and what to present for inspection. I get tetchy about these rituals, not least because they are inconsistent: every airport has its own mix of humiliation to heap on the public. The inconsistency is a clue to proceedings being at least partly theatre – a ‘best practice’ approach should lead to every airport adopting the same methods of deterring and catching the bad guys. But anyway, these hurdles were routine.

Then the incompetence really started. Some passengers at our departure gate noticed that a TV tuned to CNN was reporting a breach of security in Terminal C at Newark. That was where we were! Ears strained: something about a man going the wrong way through a security exit. I was oblivious at the time, on a stroll to stretch my legs and ease the boredom. Feeling confident I knew what lay ahead, I had ‘zoned out’ of announcements over the loudspeakers. But I did notice rather more people than usual moving back in the direction we had come. Odd, that. As I casually returned to my wife, she told me there had been an instruction for everyone to leave the terminal. The message wasn’t repeated and the arrival/departure monitor screens didn’t reinforce it. But the word was that we had to get out.

Crowd leaving Newark Airport Terminal C

As quickly as we could (i.e. slowly), thousands of us moved back to the common areas of the airport. Along the way we were ordered by local staff, not announcements on the public address,  to move to any space we could find – up a level, down a level, anywhere. There was no attempt to keep together people on the same flight, so we became thoroughly scrambled up.

Then followed four hours of no information at all about our situation. We were, however, subjected to trivial broadcasts such as the fact that a driver was waiting for passenger X at Desk Y. Eventually, we heard that the multitude would be admitted to the security system (for the second time) in batches of twenty-five. How long would that take, for goodness sake? People weren’t called forward in their order of scheduled departure and they were closely scrutinised as they shuffled through the checks again. The inevitable result was that all flights were further delayed because they had to wait for checked-in passengers to trickle randomly back. When we arrived again at the departure gate, our flight had disappeared from the monitors. So when were we likely to leave? Not a clue. There was, though, a little more detail from CNN: the man who had gone the wrong way through a security door had been chased by staff but not caught. Therefore we were slightly wiser as to what was going on, but that was pretty much it. Officialdom continued to say nothing.

As evening became early morning, the impression strengthened that the airport authorities had no proper plan. They appeared to be bumbling along. No one in a senior position communicated with the crowds, leaving us to speculate and, perhaps, worry. The decision to clear the terminal seems to have been born of a ‘no risk’ philosophy, when a ‘managed’ approach to risk would probably have produced a better outcome overall. A more sophisticated airport manager would have weighed the likely consequences of not finding the rule-breaker against the social and economic costs of disrupting the lives of thousands of people. They do have other checks to stop bombers getting on planes, don’t they?

Newark was a fiasco: systems failed and managers appeared incompetent. If we had been given more information, I might accept what happened. However, speaking as a mushroom – kept in the dark and having unpleasant stuff dumped on me – I’m even more resentful and cynical than previously about ‘security’ checks and officials’ incompetence. Anti-terrorism measures intrude ever further into our lives and cost us billions. They don’t inspire confidence and they feel like poor value.

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