At London Gatwick you know first have to present your boarding pass at a first set of gates. They're horrible - travelling with children you easily get in a position where your child is on one side of the gate, and you can't get to them. Last time the gate refused to open for me after I'd sent my 6 year old through, and I had to walk off to the side with a supervisor while my son was alone on the other side, for the security guy to check my boarding pass details and let me through manually (the reason they refused to open, apparently, was that my son stood too close to the other side; my boarding pass was then marked as having been used to pass the gates, even though the gates never opened, so next try it was being rejected regardless)
Then there's the baggage x-ray and metal detection, after which my son routinely (this has happened every time at Gatwick) gets pulled aside for extra screening, which involves x-raying his shoes, and passing him through an extra scanner, and then patting him down. I usually don't have to, but if I don't it means I won't be able to accompany him through a process he already finds uncomfortable and scary.
Nobody has been able to explain why he always gets pulled aside, and it doesn't happen on the return journey from Oslo (most of our foreign trips are to visit family in Norway).
(Meanwhile we routinely forget to take bottles of water or juice out of our carry on, and nobody has ever noticed it until I've realised afterwards; in other words, the fluid restrictions only work on people who voluntarily hand it over and doesn't put it in their bags.)
So while security can be quite efficient now, for a substantial number of passengers it's gotten to be a real pain, and it's pretty much unpredictable enough that you have to plan for it to take time just in case.
Then there's the baggage x-ray and metal detection, after which my son routinely (this has happened every time at Gatwick) gets pulled aside for extra screening, which involves x-raying his shoes, and passing him through an extra scanner, and then patting him down. I usually don't have to, but if I don't it means I won't be able to accompany him through a process he already finds uncomfortable and scary.
Nobody has been able to explain why he always gets pulled aside, and it doesn't happen on the return journey from Oslo (most of our foreign trips are to visit family in Norway).
(Meanwhile we routinely forget to take bottles of water or juice out of our carry on, and nobody has ever noticed it until I've realised afterwards; in other words, the fluid restrictions only work on people who voluntarily hand it over and doesn't put it in their bags.)
So while security can be quite efficient now, for a substantial number of passengers it's gotten to be a real pain, and it's pretty much unpredictable enough that you have to plan for it to take time just in case.