Queues for passport control at Nice airport’s Terminal 1 today appeared to stretch about 120m according to a French-national Connexion team member travelling to London.
“It was a bit chaotic and lots of people were stressed about their flights,” he said. “In the late morning there were several flights going to the US and there were two British Airways flights to London City and Heathrow. I arrived around 11:30 and saw the position.”
Video credit: Bruno Lacombe
The scenes – which he videoed – arose as airport staff and border police tried to organise travellers into two queues by those able to use automatic e-gates (PARAFEs) and those who could not.
Nice is allowing some nationals, including Britons and Americans, to use PARAFEs if they have modern biometric passports, but the team member said even the PARAFE queue grew long, partly because only three out of four e-gates were being used.
This seemed compounded by the fact, he said, that the French e-gates appeared to take longer to process travellers than the ones in London airports. His passport was rejected by the machine but he was allowed to jump the other queue.
However, he said that several Nice airport staff were present, doing their best to direct people to the correct lanes or to move people up queues if their flights were departing soon.
A spokesman for the airport said: “There was, effectively, a longer waiting time than usual, for which we are sorry.
“There were insufficient numbers of border police at that point, and there were a lot of international flights with people having to present their passports, which took a certain amount of time. It’s over now; these things happen.”
He said it was not related to the European Entry/Exit System (EES) which is not currently in operation at Nice, pending technical work on the pre-registration kiosks, which is still awaited and is under the responsibility of the interior ministry.
Nice airport is the busiest in France after the Paris airports and recently inaugurated an extension of its Terminal 2, which aims at improving passenger flows there.
It brings the airport’s capacity up to 18 million a year.
