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Perhaps chaos would be a better word...
SQ231 departed from A14 this morning. I came back from T2 (where they have bar staff in the SKL...
) at about midnight. Walked up from the Skytrain towards the gate and I could see the huge queue from a distance. Not a problem I thought, there will be a priority channel, and I will be in my seat with a glass of Krug within 10 mins max.
Well I got there and there was no sign of the blue priority channel board. What to do. It was too late to go back down to the lounges and bars (despite it being blatantly obvious that there was not a cat in hell's chance it was leaving on time), and there's nothing up that end of T3 so after killing 5 minutes by having a wander around (where I did find another outdoor/smoking area near A21 I didn't know about!) I decided to join the queue. There was a lot of people sat on the floor everywhere just waiting for the queue to go down.
I was queuing for about 15 minutes and had got to near the entrance to the gate area (bottle neck would be a better description) when an Aussie guy in front swore rather loudly and marched off past the queue and into the gate. A minute or so later more pax in front mumbled (not quite as expletive laden as the first guy
) and did the same. Cheeky sods I thought, pushing in like that. I decided to pop my head further in to see where they had gone and I saw the blue priority board - literally next to the luggage scanner itself. 
This was completely inside the gate area and out of sight until you had already queued and were in the gate. Not only that, but because the scanner had the blue board next to it, many non status pax in Y wouldn't use it, hence the bottle neck as there were only two other operational scanners, for a full 744 !!!. There was a number of less than favourable comments made about this...
I got on board at about 00.40 (for a 00.30 departure...) despite joining the queue at about 00.10 and we left well after 0100am. I thought I was at LHR for a moment...
SQ231 departed from A14 this morning. I came back from T2 (where they have bar staff in the SKL...
) at about midnight. Walked up from the Skytrain towards the gate and I could see the huge queue from a distance. Not a problem I thought, there will be a priority channel, and I will be in my seat with a glass of Krug within 10 mins max.Well I got there and there was no sign of the blue priority channel board. What to do. It was too late to go back down to the lounges and bars (despite it being blatantly obvious that there was not a cat in hell's chance it was leaving on time), and there's nothing up that end of T3 so after killing 5 minutes by having a wander around (where I did find another outdoor/smoking area near A21 I didn't know about!) I decided to join the queue. There was a lot of people sat on the floor everywhere just waiting for the queue to go down.
I was queuing for about 15 minutes and had got to near the entrance to the gate area (bottle neck would be a better description) when an Aussie guy in front swore rather loudly and marched off past the queue and into the gate. A minute or so later more pax in front mumbled (not quite as expletive laden as the first guy
) and did the same. Cheeky sods I thought, pushing in like that. I decided to pop my head further in to see where they had gone and I saw the blue priority board - literally next to the luggage scanner itself. This was completely inside the gate area and out of sight until you had already queued and were in the gate.
Not only that, but because the scanner had the blue board next to it, many non status pax in Y wouldn't use it, hence the bottle neck as there were only two other operational scanners, for a full 744 !!!. There was a number of less than favourable comments made about this...I got on board at about 00.40 (for a 00.30 departure...) despite joining the queue at about 00.10 and we left well after 0100am. I thought I was at LHR for a moment...
When a guy in Raffles asked about the priority lane he just shrugged his shoulders.
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