How a security queue gets a number next to it

Every airport already knows how long its security queues are. Very few of them tell you, and almost none tell you in a form you can act on while you are still deciding when to leave the house.

So Airportica asks the only people who reliably know: the ones standing in it.

What a report actually is

Open the airport screen in the app — it is titled with the code of the airport you are in, so At LHR at Heathrow — and you will find a section called Security queues. Under it, one row per checkpoint, each with a wait in minutes, how many people have reported it, and how long ago the most recent report came in.

That last part matters more than the number. A twelve-minute wait reported three minutes ago is useful. The same number from ninety minutes ago is history.

Tap Report security wait, choose the checkpoint you are standing at, and say how long it took. That is the whole interaction. It is deliberately shorter than the time you would spend deciding whether to bother.

Why we show the report count

A single report is one person's experience of one queue at one moment. It might be a family with three prams ahead of them. It might be someone who walked straight through Fast Track and does not realise the main hall is backed up.

Showing how many reports a number is built from lets you weigh it yourself, rather than asking you to trust an average that hides how thin it is. When a checkpoint has four reports, you should read it differently than when it has forty. So we tell you which one you are looking at.

What we do not do

We do not estimate. If nobody has reported a checkpoint recently, the app says so — No fresh community queue reports are available — instead of showing a stale figure or a guess dressed up as data.

That is a deliberately unsatisfying answer, and we prefer it to the alternative. A wrong queue time is worse than no queue time, because you act on it.

Near your gate, once you are through

The same screen continues past security into Near my gate: what is within a fifteen-minute walk of where you are actually sitting, with the walking time attached to each one. Not everything in the terminal. The part you can reach and get back from before boarding.

It needs a confirmed gate to be useful, which usually means scanning your boarding pass first — the app reads the gate, terminal and time off it and fills the rest in from live flight data.

---

If you have used it and something was wrong, report the queue you are standing in. That is the entire mechanism. It works in proportion to how many people bother, which is an honest thing to say out loud rather than hide behind a number.