The UK Department for Transport has published a report titled "Official Statistics: Air passenger experience of security screening: 2026", released on 2 October 2026. The document sets out results drawn from a short set of questions about security screening posed to departing passengers at selected UK airports during 2026.
The statistics are taken from a module of the Civil Aviation Authority's Departing Passenger Survey and have been presented by the Department for Transport as official statistics. The publication summarises passenger responses about their experiences of security screening rather than providing a full audit of airport security performance.
The report is framed as a focused snapshot. It covers responses to a small number of questions that ask passengers about their direct experience of security checks during departures at the airports surveyed in 2026.
The Department for Transport's release does not itself claim to be a comprehensive measure of security operations across all UK airports. Instead it reports the outcomes of the short questionnaire carried out as part of the CAA's wider departing passenger work.
Scope and source
The source material is the Department for Transport publication bearing the Official Statistics label and the title given above. The underlying user responses were collected through the CAA Departing Passenger Survey at selected UK airports in 2026 and were used to compile the statistics summarised in the report.
What is reported
The Department for Transport describes the content of the publication as results from the short set of questions on security screening posed to departing passengers. The report therefore documents passenger-reported experience rather than operational metrics produced by airport or security authorities.
The DfT presentation is concise in focus: it communicates what departing passengers said in the specific survey module about security screening during 2026. No additional airport-level operational data or broader analysis beyond these survey responses is included in the supplied summary.
The publication date given by the Department for Transport is 2 October 2026. Readers seeking further granularity on methodology or raw survey outputs should consult the published report on the Department for Transport's website and the Civil Aviation Authority's survey documentation for full technical details.
The Department for Transport's release provides a short authoritative record of how the selected cohort of departing passengers reported their experience of security screening in 2026. The material will be of interest to policy observers and to stakeholders monitoring passenger perceptions of airport security processes.
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