Simon Calder: Get smart and spare poor travellers senseless misery

The most stressful part of any flight – exploding jet engines excepted – is the airport of departure. As with prisons and hospitals, you want to get out as soon as possible, but face a sequence of hurdles before you can.

Every positive technological advance, such as allowing passengers to dodge check-in by printing their own boarding passes, is soon offset by a negative. This week, Durham-Tees Valley became the latest British airport to impose a charge on passengers: everyone has to pay a £6 fee before they are allowed through to the departure lounge. This constitutes a particularly cruel and unusual punishment, effectively an admission fee for passing through airport security.

Travellers already pay quite high enough a price, emotionally, for the privilege of being allowed to board an aircraft. When you buy a plane ticket, you agree to surrender your dignity. While your motive for flying might be a much-needed holiday, a family gathering or an important business meeting, it is the job of the security staff to assume you are an international terrorist intent on mass murder, until you can convince them otherwise.

The men and women who scrutinise you at UK airports – in my experience, courteously and professionally – are required to treat every traveller with equal vigilance. In the strange world of aviation security, that means a four-year-old on a family holiday to Spain is regarded as representing the same level of threat as a dodgy character who booked a last-minute ticket to the Middle East and whose passport reveals a fair amount of "form" in visiting politically questionable destinations. That last description applies to me.

It is absurd that security staff are not empowered to ask searching questions about my journey and purpose, and instead waste time and energy searching the bags of blameless passengers in case they are carrying nail-files, soft drinks or printer cartridges.

The spread of "pat-down" searches is a direct result of successive failures to use common sense at airports. The "Underpants Bomber" should have triggered all kinds of alarms before he tried to detonate explosives strapped to his body aboard a Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. Someone who had spent a spell in Yemen, and who paid cash for a plane ticket a few days ahead, deserves a thorough going-over before being allowed anywhere near a passenger plane. As do I.