The Joy of Air Travel

I'll blog this week about the fab weekend I've just had in London with Jen but I wanted to get this off my chest in the meantime...

I flew with Rob and Adrian from Southampton to Linz in Austria yesterday, via Frankfurt. Because our flights weren't with code-sharing airlines (SOU-FRA was with Flybe, and FRA-LNZ was with Lufthansa), we had to pick up our bags in Frankfurt as if we were ending our journey, then check them onto our Linz flight as if it were a new journey. We were happy to do this as there was a decent layover time between flights, and the only alternative was to go to Heathrow and fly to Frankfurt then on to Linz from there, which took exactly the same length of time as the Southampton option once you'd factored in 1.5 hours to get to Heathrow.

The flight from Southampton to Frankfurt was fairly uneventful - unless you count me being very thoroughly frisked at security; I swear the woman thought I was carrying explosives in my underwires. We arrived into Terminal 2 at Frankfurt and picked up our bags from the carousel. We knew we had to get to Terminal 1 for our next flight, so we followed the signs for the Air Train that runs between the terminals. When we got to the train stop at Terminal 1, we were immediately asked for our flight documentation, which we produced. Then straight after that we had to go through security, which I thought was a bit weird, because I still had my suitcase with me, but I didn't consider it altogether strange - when Jen and I had come back from Turkey in May, the airport at Bodrum scanned all luggage, including suitcases destined for the hold, at the front door of the airport, so I figured they were just doing the same thing here.

Until a woman behind the scanner looked at me and asked if this was my suitcase, to which I replied Yes. She opened it up, went straight for my toiletry bag, pulled out a 250ml bottle of conditioner and a very expensive aerosol can of heat-protecting spray for when I'm using my hair straighteners, and gave me the look. You know, the look that says 'the rules about liquids have been in place for over two years, what planet have you been on?'

'Yes,' I said.

She looked at me again. 'You can't take this onto the plane'.

'I don't intend to, I haven't even got to check-in yet,' I replied. 'I'm going to put my bag in the hold'.

'But this is the last line of security before you get on the plane,' she said, 'you should have checked in while you were in Terminal 2.'

I was getting quite annoyed now, and told her I had never in my life had to check in at a different terminal from the one I was leaving from, but nevertheless she told me that that was what I had to do if I wanted to get my over-sized bottles and illegal hand-luggage items past her and into the terminal. I asked her where the signs were that told me to check in before transferring terminals and she said, and I quote:

'There aren't any signs because this is is just a temporary measure. Normally you check in at Terminal 1.'

My patience was truly being tested at this point, to the extent that Rob (who, incidentally, had managed to make his way past the scanner while carrying a 250ml bottle of shampoo of his own) came back over to where I was standing and tried to get me to calm down. My protestations at my predicament and suggestions that temporary measures be accompanied by temporary signage seemed to fall on deaf ears, so in the end I admitted defeat and told the woman to throw away my toiletries, hoping that Eva would have some conditioner I could use. I was just about to ask the woman why it was that she would confiscate those two things, yet leave me with a razor and a pair of nail scissors in my luggage, but I figured that drawing her attention to those items could only end badly for me, so I decided to cut my losses and keep quiet.

Once in Terminal 1, every Lufthansa check-in desk we got to was completely deserted. Rob ended up asking two separate people wearing Lufthansa uniforms where we should check in. They both said that we could check in at our gate, so we went off upstairs to gate B7 and asked the man on the desk if we could check in here. He looked at us quizzically and said 'Yes, I suppose so... You haven't checked in downstairs already?'

Sigh.