Flying in India

I went to Bangalore on Wednesday to check out the office there and to chat to a bunch of people. India has a thriving low cost airline industry these days (though they still serve food and drinks and they don’t seem to have a very scary yield management system in place). The one thing that is really different is how the security checks are handled.

Everybody lines up to have their luggage checked, but nobody bothers emptying their pockets of metal objects. You just step through the little port and the beep goes off and then there is a guy who gives you a personal scan. Women are helped by women and men by men, so the whole thing is sex separated, with the lines labeled using the familiar man/woman pictures familiar from toilets.

I of course like a good European did put my wallet, cell phone and all that in my backpack before the scan and was because of this the only person for whom the beep didn’t go off. Not that that mattered, nobody pays attention to whether the metal detector goes off, since it always does and I got the personal treatment anyway.