Posted by Chris Leadbeater, Travel Writer, TravelMail
The thorny issue of whether body scanners should be used at airports has taken another lurch onto the news pages today – with the warning that passengers who refuse to submit themselves to this security check will be barred from taking flight.
Actually, ‘thorny’ is probably the wrong word to use here, because if you are carrying anything vaguely sharp and pointy as you attempt to board a plane, these scrutinising devices will spot it. Along with anything else you may have on your person – birthmarks, that bruise where you bashed your thigh on the kitchen counter, that small bulge at the waist where you shovelled down an extra croissant 20 minutes earlier. Oh, and any bomb you have sewn into your underwear, if you happen to be a terrorist. The lot, basically. It will all be on display, because these scanners see everything.
OK. Hang on. That previous paragraph isn’t entirely true. The scanners produce pale, mildly blurry photostats of your body that reveal any hidden objects, but can’t detect if you’ve waxed your legs. And yet people are understandably concerned that the naked truth of their existence will be beamed into a computer as they file through the shoes-off-please queue on their way to the gate. Not a truth that everyone else in the line will be able to ogle, admittedly – but a truth visible to security staff nonetheless.
Nor will these concerns be assuaged by yesterday’s somewhat hectoring comments from Transport Secretary Lord (Andrew) Adonis, who told Parliament: “If a passenger is selected [for scanning] and declines, they will not be permitted to fly.” That he also said: “In the immediate future, only a small proportion of passengers will be selected for scanning,” is unlikely to calm these choppy waters. The message is quite clear: ‘Get your bits out before you get on the plane – or you don’t get on the plane’. Well, after you Andy. With a name like that, you shouldn’t have any fear of lumps and bumps.
This development comes, of course, in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day plane bombing, where al-Qaeda operative Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab smuggled explosives onto a Detroit-bound service by stitching them into his nether-garments – exploiting the fact that, well, your pants are the one place that the airport body pat-down never ventures. So, as of this week, scanners will be deployed at Heathrow and Manchester, with Birmingham joining the Peek-A-Boo Club before February is out.
That near-miss over Michigan is the key detail here. Because ultimately – and leaving aside the nanny-state lecturing from the Transport Secretary, who could surely have phrased his announcement in less daddy-knows-best terms – this issue boils down to a choice. Do you want to avoid embarrassment? Or do you want to be safe? And personally, I’m quite happy to have my body parts slapped onto a screen if it means the same body parts won’t be strewn across an American cityscape just because I had the misfortune to board a plane with Mr Tick-Tick-Boom. It seems an easy call.
But I’ll be particularly in favour of the scanners if they achieve something beyond safety – if they manage to speed up the current farce that is getting through airport security. On Sunday morning, I caught a flight from Geneva to London. The process – from wearily joining the back of the snaking line to finally putting my footwear back on after I’d half-undressed in the name of making it past the metal detector without there being a chorus of bleeps and burbles – took a good half hour. This isn’t to single out Geneva Airport for special criticism (it’s a perfectly good airport, and the Alpine view from its windows is certainly more appealing than the Hounslow vista at Heathrow) – it’s the same scenario at every airport these days. Coat off. Belt off. Can we have your shoes, sir? Do you have any potentially dangerous spring-water or shampoo products, madam? If the introduction of full-body scanners shortens this dreary ordeal by even a third, it will be achieving something in addition to theoretically safer flights.
I suspect, sadly, that this won’t be the case – that body scans will become yet another facet of security checks – another five minutes rolling around on the Wasted Time Clock – rather than a simplification of the convoluted system now in place. And I understand people’s privacy concerns – the idea that a random stranger can see almost to the core of your being is an unnerving one. But equally, spare a thought for the airport employees who will have to monitor these delightful snapshots. After a five-hour shift perusing nude outlines of all creatures great and small, nothing is going to seem less exotic than the human body. Salacious? Sexy? More like just another tear-jerkingly boring element of life at the decidedly dull sharp end of the travel industry.
Are you in favour of airport scanners, or do you consider them to be an invasion of your privacy? Do you think they will make flying more secure? Have your say…
I received this from a friend of mine and would like to share it as a reminder to all of us.
