Security officers said it had been “hot and hectic” at London’s Heathrow airport this summer.
While airline and airport executives try to pin the blame on each other for summer travel chaos, the officers are dealing with the fallout from cancelled flights and big queues at Heathrow’s terminals — in teams that are inexperienced and overworked.
“Every day I come in and there’s someone new,” said one long-serving security guard, who works for Heathrow and had seen frustrated passengers resorting to “fisticuffs” over queue-jumping. New recruits train for a month, but it takes another three to six months to learn the job properly, he reckoned — if seasoned colleagues are at hand. At the moment, “it’s the blind leading the blind”, he said, adding: “Once you’re behind, it’s impossible to catch up.”