An airport is usually a busy place, full of stressed and time pressured people. This chaotic scene has been made drastically more unnerving with the add on of Covid. Wandering around seeing strangers who are far less friendly (not that people traveling tend to be massively friendly anyway!) as a result of their face covering is, I must say, a rather disconcerting thing.
People need to travel and we cannot pause our lives for ever. Nevertheless, a busy airport is not the perfect place to be during these times. When I was in Heathrow airport just under a week ago there were innumerable amounts of people, and we were all made to stand in tight knit queues for vast amounts of time. As a result of many staff being on furlough, there were not enough people to check everyone in, in a reasonable amount of time. This would not usually be a problem as the only threat this would pose would be to making your flight on time. The major issue now is being so close to lots of others for so long.
People have to have their temperature checked before entering the airport and it is assumed that all passengers are well and virus free, but I think that there could of been more done in terms of distancing. When I was in one of these lengthy queues, a man in front of me was complaining to a member of staff. He was saying how arbitrary the situation was. He went on to say that in the bathrooms only one man could use a urinal at a time(to make sure that they are all distanced) yet when they come to check in, it was like being in a zoo full of people. It seems pretty ridiculous to me how the bathroom measures are being taken hugely seriously, yet something so obvious as standing in a queue to check in, is not.
While it Is important to take in account the fact that this was during half term, which is why the airport was relatively busy, they should have been anticipating this. Although it seems that getting on an airplane at any point right now comes with a risk.
It will be interesting to see whether efficiency improves when furlough comes to an end which is very soon. I hope that having more staff will improve the queueing problem but when more passengers start flying the problem may simply expand in scale.
