The boss of Berlin Airport has said non-EU nationals arriving in the German capital are having to queue for up to two hours under a new digital border system, and warned the situation is “not bearable over the summer”.<\/p>\n
Aletta von Massenbach told the BBC that at one terminal in Berlin, where Ryanair and Wizz Air operate, waiting times can run between “an hour to two hours”.<\/p>\n
Under the EU’s new Entry-Exit System (EES) travellers from outside the bloc must register biometric information when entering most European countries, which is checked when they leave.<\/p>\n
Airports and airlines say the system is not working. The European Commission (EC) says it is willing to offer more support.<\/p>\n
EES is meant to modernise the EU’s system of border control, making it more secure and eventually making travel smoother.<\/p>\n
It has been fully operational since April. <\/p>\n
While the system has worked fine in some places, there have been regular reports of long waits at passport control, especially at peak times.<\/p>\n
Some passengers say they have missed flights home because they’ve been held up in queues.<\/p>\n
Von Massenbach said one issue was that EU countries used different systems.<\/p>\n
“There are so many sub-systems for each and every member state,” she told the BBC’s Today programme. “We see that the complexity doesn’t really support smooth processing at the border.”<\/p>\n
Technology issues have prevented EES from being used in the UK at the Port of Dover where French border checks take place.<\/p>\n
A new processing area has 84 kiosks to record fingerprints and photographs but currently is not being used because the technology for the kiosks – the responsibility of the French authorities \u2013 cannot be activated.<\/p>\n
Port of Dover chief executive, Doug Bannister, told MPs on Thursday “time is rapidly running out” to fix it.<\/p>\n
“We are rapidly heading towards the start of the critical summer period and are yet to receive the assurances we need to avoid what has the potential to be a very challenging six weeks,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The boss of Berlin Airport has said non-EU nationals arriving in the German capital are having to queue…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-669786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}