Modern Flight Travel - Reason Has Flown

I’ve been traveling by plane for the past forty years and quite a bit of that travel has been since the rise of terrorism. I remember years ago driving to Friendship Airport (now BWI) merely to go out on the observation deck to watch planes, close up, landing and taking off. Now I have to take my shoes off and go through a security check.

I understand the reason for this and am glad that airports have my safety in mind. I want to arrive at my destination in one piece. However, sometimes I think reason has flown away (pun intended).

Today we experienced the Hamburg Airport as we were preparing to fly to London. After all these years, we went through the most intensive security check we’ve experienced so far.

I’ve never been questioned about lipstick before. Today they examined every minute quantity of liquid, powder or paste. These items of ours combined fit into one regulation sized plastic bag and we were allowed two. I’m not going to bore you with the long list of regulations of the Hamburg Airport. You can read all four pages here if you’d like.

http://www.airport.de/en/sec_cabin_baggage_regulations.html

Under what items may be carried on, their regulations state that one small camera or set of binoculars can be carried on. Those who know me know that I carry expensive Nikon equipment in a backpack. I am NOT going to put $5,000 work of camera equipment in my check-in luggage. I did, however, put an expensive tripod and reflectors into my suitcase. They are not so much at risk with rough baggage handling or thieving baggage handlers.

Today I had to take all my lenses and camera out of my tightly packed camera backpack and put them in a separate tray to go back through X-ray. My pack was also resent through X-ray but I didn’t have to remove my flash.

So today I was questioned about my lipstick but not my electronic flash. I did not have to take off my shoes and I’d worn easy-to-slip-off shoes instead of the tennis shoes I prefered because of the long walk from the London Underground to our destination through East Ham streets.

By the way, I’d forgotten about two nail files in my purse and camera bag. Apparently they weren’t detected.

1 comment:

  1. No need to worry about the security nowadays, as private jet charters have emerged into aviation business globally. They provide you good security level and external auditing team audits the flight before the travel. And no need to wait in long queues for security check ins and you can keep all your luggage's with you.
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