Over Labor Day weekend, my wife and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to visit my father, who is sick with pancreatic cancer. Due in large part to the excellent care at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, my father is now going on three years post diagnosis. We had been planning to visit him for the holiday weekend, but our visit became more poignant as he spent last week in the hospital.
Traveling to Washington, we made it through the airport security screening without any major problems. My carry-on bag got searched, as they saw a bottle of liquid and with the new draconian restrictions only certain liquids are allowed to be carried onto a flight. In my case, it was contact lens solution — a 2-ounce bottle of contact lens solution — that was about half to two-thirds full. The TSA screener saw the bottle of solution, and noted that given how full it was, it was much less than the allowed 4 ounces of eye drops or contact solution. My wife’s bags didn’t get searched on the way to Washington, which it turns out is lucky for her.
On the way back it was a different story. Her bag got searched. And even though she had nothing in her bag that is specifically restricted (for information on what you can and can’t take, view this list) a number of items were confiscated — including a half-ounce bottle of Visine eye drops, which she correctly told the screener was allowed. His response, “no liquids are allowed in carry-on luggage.”
That’s not true. Eye drops are. So are liquid medications. I’d hate to have been a person carrying some much-needed medication only to have a low-paid, untrained TSA goon take it away. Especially if that medication was something that the person couldn’t do without for the duration of the flight.
What bugs me about the things they confiscated is this: makeup and small amounts of personal items hardly seem like a security threat. I mean really, do you seriously think someone is going to jab a flight attendant with a tube of lipstick (or toothpaste) and say, “fly this plane to Havana or I blow everyone up!”
Sure, there’s a few bad people out there who will try to do evil things — like blowing a plane up with a shoe bomb — but if our intelligence agencies were as good as the British, these types of nefarious activities would be nipped in the bud before they had a chance to come to fruition.
This ban does absolutely nothing substantive to make us more secure. What it does is make it appear like the authorities are doing something, when in fact they aren’t. They should be doing a better job of catching the real bad guys, rather than confiscating harmless materials from average travelers.
But if they do have to confiscate things, then at least the TSA should have mailers that people could use to send their belongings home. We saw one woman lose a lot of expensive cosmetics on our trip when her bag was inspected at the security checkpoint. If there had been a way for her to reclaim those items, or to send them back to her home address, at least she wouldn’t have been out a lot of money.
Like a lot of things these days, it seems that when a scandal, crime or problem occurs, the response is an unfocused over-reaction rather than a well thought out plan on how to realistically deal with the situation at hand. Are we safer because the TSA now prohibits a large amount of personal items in carry-on luggage? Hardly.
This is very discouraging.
You’d think that the entire body of TSA screeners would be well informed of even the slightest easing of restrictions. The whole thing is ludicrous and pure theatrics, as more than one expert has said, like this former pilot on: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/09/06/airline_security/