"You can't do this. It's ridiculous!" yelled a hot-faced man, sweat clinging to his forehead in the Greek heat.

It wasn't only the 30C temperature that was causing his blood to boil and his cool to be lost. This poor man had been hit by a double punch of airport logistics that'd send MC Escher mad and a Ryanair system seemingly designed to make you cry.

Athens International Airport has been sending off and welcoming passengers since 2001, when it opened as part of a pre-2004 Summer Olympics development plan.

It is a fairly standard large European airport in lots of ways. In fact, wandering into the main check-in area, the presence of ouzo in the gift shop was the only obvious indicator I wasn't in Berlin or Rome, but rather in the Greek capital. Out here, all is relatively standard and calm.

Have you been caught up in airport chaos? Email webtravel@reachplc.com

But beyond the checked-luggage area, the airport's major flaws become obvious.

For some inexplicable reason, the departure boards at Athens International show flights that left the airport an hour before, and those due to depart in an hour, but no further in the future.

That means passengers have to wait until 60 minutes before their flight departs to find out where it will depart from. This is a big problem, as the check-in long breaks off into three different gate areas: A, B and C.

Bip your ticket and head through security towards the wrong one, and you'll end up a long way from the right gate and having to go through security again. The walk back is well over a kilometer, which isn't a distance you'd want to take on when hauling bags and rushing for a flight.

And rushing you'd be.

Not only are the distances between the check-in area significant and ones that must be covered on foot, but the queues that await passengers at the other end are also massive.

First up is bag-check. For C, a winding queue of several hundred people awaited me. I grew increasingly hot as I stood in it, wondering if the two hours I'd given myself to get onto the Ryanair flight to London Luton would prove too little.

The queue would get smaller, then suddenly halt, as passengers, having failed to find an airport worker who could tell them where they needed to go in the absence of departure board information, were rushed to the front so they might not miss their flights. Hundreds were let through in this way.

Bag check cleared, I'm sure some will have breathed a sigh of relief before treating themselves to a pre-flight Mythos or sandwich, not realising what lay beyond the departure hall.

A passport queue just as long as the security scrum spelled 'missed flight' for those lulled into this false sense that everything was all in order.

I made it through in time, five minutes before Ryanair's boarding cut-off. Others were not so lucky.

A group of around 20 pleaded with two staff members as us on-timers were taken out onto the tarmac to stand for half an hour, while our delayed flight was cleaned. Some looked on the verge of tears as they were told that their boarding was an impossibility, despite the plane just sitting there, metres away.

The flight was delayed further so their bags could be removed from the hold, which in turn caused the pilots to miss their allocated slots.

I asked Ryanair what happened to those passengers and if they'd be getting a refund, to which the budget airline offered a straightforward, if not sympathetic, answer.

“Due to delays caused by border control at Athens Airport on 14 June, a number of passengers booked to travel from Athens to London Luton were not in the boarding gate area when boarding for their flight closed and missed their flight from to Athens to London Luton. All passengers that were at the boarding gate when this flight from Athens to London Luton boarded, travelled without incident," the airline's spokesperson said.

Greek airports have received a lot of negative press in recent months following the introduction of the EU-wide Entry/Exit System, which requires some passengers to have their fingerprints taken and to provide information.

Ahead of the summer rush, queues have already begun building up at major airports including Athens. One passenger said that it took nearly two and a half hours to clear passport control in Athens, with those at island airports like Zante reporting similar waits. Athens, the country’s busiest airport, expects up to 15,000 passengers a day during summer.

Responding to the queues and not wanting to deter one of the country's biggest tourist markets, Greek Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni decided to exempt Brits from the queues. She said that the government did not want visitors “burdened” by bureaucracy and promised that Brits would be “fast-tracked” through the system, describing entry and exit as taking "a minute or so."

However, at the end of May, the exemption was scrapped. The Greek Foreign Ministry said that it had no information that “specific nationalities are temporarily exempt from the relevant procedure.”

Athens Airport was contacted for comment.