Not that we haven’t known that for some time but it was recently drilled home to me on my flight back from Madrid last week.
My son Enrique has asthma. He got quite bad with it earlier this year when we were in Spain and a Spanish doctor prescribed a cough suppressant called Expectu to help him sleep.
When I was in Madrid, my wife asked me to get another bottle of Expectu to bring home. So far, so good. Except, the bottles for sale in the pharmacies were 200ml and you can only bring bottles less than 100ml onto the plane (I only had hand luggage).
What did I do? I asked the pharmacist to decant the 200ml of Expectu into smaller bottles (in dreadfully pidgen Spanish!). He obliged and poured it into four 75ml bottles. I put these bottles into a clear plastic bag along with my deodorant and toothpaste fully expecting to be stopped at the airport.
Not a bit of it. Going through security, the guard took out one of the four bottles, checked the volume of it and, satisfied that it was less than 100ml, replaced it in the clear plastic bag!
Fantastic! For all you aspirant terrorists out there making liquid bombs – decant the bombs into small bottles if you want to get them onto the plane and you are sorted (oh, and just in case you thought I was serious, here’s why you should save yourself the trouble of trying to make a liquid bomb)!
Making your own liquid explosives on a plane would probably be tricky. That said, if you brought a few hundred milliliters of Astrolite on board (say, in a medicine bottle with a seal at the mouth to reduce the chances of them sniffing it out) you could cause a lot of trouble.
How sad is it that when you said “Airport security is a joke”, I thought it was in reference to Apple’s base station?
You might have also observed that you could carry the bottles in a jacket without metal fasteners directly through the metal detector and nothing would alert the staff that you were a walking liquid dispenser. I’ve (accidentally) done that with Evian, another terrorist liquid.
Talking about re-packaging explosive material: why not have the airport lounge air scanned for explosive fumes. If the carry on itmes contains explosives, the chemical traces would get sucked into A/C system where even subatomic concentrations would be detected with excruciating accuracy and alarm would sound. Same technology could be used directly inside the airplane cabin to give the crew a 5 minutes heads up, of an explosive device use intention. However the cabin detector would need some intelligence to supperess false alarms caused by occasional flatulence by passengers 😉
Wow, this is, actually, no joke at all. It always gets tricky on airports, I was working for a cruise line for 4 years, and done maybe a couple of hundreds of flights. Sometimes one could get stuck with no apparent reason, and sometimes things like this are possible.
You’ve got to be kidding! HAHAHA! Why is there so many people in this world that don’t have a clue what they are doing?