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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I fly from Schiphol with great regularity and my boarding pass is definitely checked every time by a person (as is my passport) right before boarding the plane. Usually the same happens on the return leg, and the majority of my trips are within Schengen.

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I'm actually surprised that Schiphol does that. My informal survey indicates that ex-Eastern European countries tend to check more as do the French.

In Zurich your id is virtually never checked on Schengen flights. Last time I flew through Vienna security wanted to see the boarding pass, but not the ID. Dusseldorf also didn't check when I flew through it last (alas, a few years ago).

I know at the Oslo airport it's fairly common to never show ID or your boarding pass to a person if you're flying within Schengen. --Check in at the automated kiosk, put on your own luggage tag, scan the tag at the bag drop, and you're done there. Passing through security means scanning your boarding pass rather than showing it to someone most of the time, and finally many of the gates have automated doors where you scan your boarding pass again to board the plane. The same applies to other Scandinavian airports as well.

From Schiphol on Schengen flights frequently (~50% of the time) no one checks anything in my experience outside of scanning the QR to get into security, and into the plance.

It can also depend on the airline - only some airlines check passports within Schengen (I've only heard of it being required by LCCs)

In my experience some airports check but most do not. At least Arlanda, Brussels, Chopin and Vienna did not check when I last was there.

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