Scare tactics: Why I worry about airports' responses to potential terror attacks

No one was harmed at Heathrow on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, when first Terminal 3 then Terminal 4 were evacuated after someone set off a fire alarm at lunchtime.

At Manchester airport on Wednesday, though, there was some damage. An unusual item was identified in the hold baggage screening area, and the bag containing it was blown up in a controlled explosion. Again, no one was harmed.

So should we deem the week a success for the unceasing effort to keep airline passengers safe and secure? Speaking with the considerable benefit of hindsight, I am not sure we should.

Let’s start with those pesky fire alarms. Terminals 3 and 4 are huge. Were they stand-alone airports, each would rank in the UK top 10 for passenger numbers. At both terminals, what happens at a distant departure gate has precious little bearing on the check-in area, a good quarter-mile away. I was surprised, therefore, to see that in each case the immediate response to a someone triggering a fire alarm was to evacuate the entire terminal.

Passengers who had already passed through security and gone “airside” were led down to the apron. From the social media footage I have seen, they appeared to have been allowed to mill around, in a zone where passengers are normally very strictly controlled.

“Landside”, large crowds formed in the area where vehicles drop off.

Both arrangements struck me as far from ideal. The wholesale closures delayed dozens of flights, to the considerable cost of the airlines. For thousands of passengers, the stress and upset of being involved in an evacuation was compounded by the resulting delays and, in some cases, missed connections.

After the Terminal 3 false alarm, I asked Heathrow about why the whole terminal was evacuated, and whether anything might change in the way that fire alerts are handled in the light of the incident; plenty of passengers complained about “chaotic” scenes, with staff uncertain how to respond. I asked again after the Terminal 4 event.

On Friday, a Heathrow spokesperson told me: “Due to a technical fault the activation of a fire alarm in Terminal 3 and 4 resulted in alarms being triggered on a wider scale. Passengers and colleagues were evacuated from both terminals on two separate occasions during the course of this week. Our investigations showed these to be false alarms and passengers and colleagues were re-entering the terminals within less than an hour of both incidences.

“We regret the disruption caused by this and apologise to those affected. We continue with our investigations into the matter.”

The security scare at Manchester airport on Wednesday morning had a far greater effect. Many flights were cancelled or severely delayed, as bomb-disposal experts blew up the harmless object that had caused the kerfuffle. Understandably, the airport won’t say what it was that caused an alert; those who would do us harm must not be allowed to gain a closer understanding of security processes.

But with, once again, the invaluable asset of hindsight, I will observe that the complete evacuation of Manchester Terminal 3 strikes me as a response towards the extreme end on the spectrum of options.

“The safety and security of our customers and employees will always be our number one priority,” the Manchester airport statement concluded.

Of course. But all three demonstrations of disarray concern me. Troublemakers may conclude that it takes a trivial anti-social act to cause widespread disruption at our biggest airports. Perish the thought, but there is a risk that the odd idiot who dawdled in duty free and is running late for his flight might hit a fire alarm button in a bid to delay his plane departing – a variant on the fools who get caught in traffic en route to the airport and phone in “bomb threats” aimed at stalling the departure.

My final worry is, I hope, unfounded: that terrorists plotting who-knows-what mayhem could identify opportunities from the airports’ reactions to perceived dangers.

An “abundance of caution” sounds a good principle for running an airport, and indeed your life. But caution can be overabundant. If the reaction in these hypersensitive times to every perceived threat is to empty an entire airport terminal, there is a risk that terrorists will gain comfort from all the disruption, and even weave our jittery reactions into their next outrage.

I would love to be comprehensively wrong.