A London Gatwick (EGKK) all inbound passengers (from outside the UK; I have never flown by airline within the UK) end up in a single hall for the passport check. There, you can get into the wrong queue but your passport will still be checked. Then you collect your luggage and you have a choice of green/red (nothing to declare / something to declare). This is the point I was trying to illustrate.
Schengen is probably a separate scenario – like somebody landing at Gatwick from say Edinburgh. They probably don’t do a passport check.
chflyer wrote:
Brexit is going to be a big headache for many international airports
Actually, it will not make any appreciable difference at all to the larger airports.
- in the customs area, passengers from the UK will now have to use the red/green channels, not the blue channel
- in passport control, the passengers with UK passports might have to use a different counter or e-gate (not the EU/EEA/Swiss counters), unless there is an agreement similar to the EU/Switzerland agreement and these become EU/EEA/Swiss/UK counters/gates), so worst case, they have to re-designate some counters.
The only airports that will have a headache are those that do not have any non-EU traffic at all and hence do not have any customs channels.
Peter wrote:
A London Gatwick (EGKK) all inbound passengers (from outside the UK; I have never flown by airline within the UK) end up in a single hall for the passport check. There, you can get into the wrong queue but your passport will still be checked. Then you collect your luggage and you have a choice of green/red (nothing to declare / something to declare). This is the point I was trying to illustrate.
I still don’t understand your point/question. When arriving from a Schengen country into a Schengen country, or when arriving on a domestic flight, all passengers bypass passport control and end up directly at the luggage belts.
172driver wrote:
no immigration or customs checks, l
W R O N G!!!!!!!
CUSTOMS has NOTHING to do with Schengen. It only concerns immigration.
Peter wrote:
A London Gatwick (EGKK) all inbound passengers (from outside the UK; I have never flown by airline within the UK) end up in a single hall for the passport check. There, you can get into the wrong queue but your passport will still be checked. Then you collect your luggage and you have a choice of green/red (nothing to declare / something to declare). This is the point I was trying to illustrate.
I used to do this a lot when I was much younger, so 30 years ago approx. At the time, there were EU citizens only and rest of the world counters. My flight would always arrive shortly after some african 747 and as a Swiss citizen at the time, I was denied the EU channel. The result usually was that if that african 747 was on time, a waiting time in excess of 2 hours, while the EU counters were empty.
Hence at one of the Davos meetings, our then foreign minister took the UK PM of the day (I believe it was Blair but could have been before that) aside and told him the sad story of the poor Swiss standing in queue with the Africans when his Norwegian colleague mentioned the same. The PM was aghast and promised fast help. That summer, EFTA was added to the EU channel which allowed those countries also to be processed via the EU channel. In a relatively short period, this policy was adopted pretty much everywhere. Needless to say, a huge relief for us.
Clearly, those channels are there to allow speedy treatment of passports likely to not cause any sort of investigative process. And yes, you can queue up on “All passports” or “EU/EFTA” and as an EU/EFTA citizen will be admitted, but you can not queue on the EU/EFTA queue with a third country passport and expect to be admitted, very likely you will be sent to the back of the non-eu queue.
Schengen however has no meaning at all in the UK, never had and never will, as the UK was never a Schengen member. And following the Brexit transition period, it will have to be decided by the EU/EFTA countries how to process UK passports. Either the UK joins e.g. EFTA or there is a special agreement done or they might end up in the All Passports queue at EU/EFTA airports.
The Customs channels later on are a different piece of cake yet again. So far, it mattered if you are entering the UK from an EU state and therefore did not need customs or if you come from outside, whether you have anything to declare. Customs however have nothing to do with the immigration issue.
The whole thing has got obfuscated.
I’ve never flown commercially within the UK either, but I’m sure there is/was a separate exit into the Gatwick North Terminal arrivals hall for UK, Isle of Man, Channel Islands etc, which implies the passengers are routed differently through the airport depending whether they’re domestic or international.
I flew City airport to Scotland twice with nothing more than just a credit card 
, this is not the case at Luton
At Stansted arrivals, I managed to sneak ahead of the queue few times and got my passport checked in the cabin crew counter using an “air-side crew card+ PPL” but I did got rejected/lectured once and I was sent to the back of the EU/EEA queue 
Peter wrote:
The whole thing has got obfuscated.
Why?
As already stated before:
- If you have to pass customs and/or immigration (i.e. “passport control”) is only depending on your country of origin.
- Within the respective control, it is at the sole discretion of airport and/or border authority if/which different waiting lines they have:
Some (smaller APs and GA-Fields) have only one line, some have separate lines for EU and or EFTA nationals;
some have separate lines for people with visas vs. people under visa waiver programs;
some have separate lines for people who want to enter for permanent residence;
some have separate lines for families;
some have separate lines for frequent travelers;
some have separate lines for handicapped…
- Different lines for different nationalities are much more common in passport control than in customs. Logic behind that is while time required passport control can differ significantly based on your nationality, time for customs control is typically independent of nationality.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
CUSTOMS has NOTHING to do with Schengen. It only concerns immigration.
I know that, Mooney. The point I was trying to make is that intra-Schengen flights are treated like domestic flights with neither customs nor immigration checks on either end.
