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UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

bbc.co.uk

41–50 of 252 posts

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#41

I flew yesterday and in the plane realized I had some water from my daughter in the backpack. It was scanned and missed of course. And why wouldn't they miss it, it's a waste of time anyway. But at least they harassed a 3-year old to stand in a certain way to get scanned and fail at it. Unrelated, but I've come to believe it's a form of social welfare. So much policing for nothing, not just airports, wars on drugs et…

It’s common for airports to allow liquids for babies/toddlers. Just take them out of the bag and put them in a padded box normally. No 100ml limit either- have taken regular water bottles through too (for milk formula). Various airports have different rules. Dubai was quite lax, you don’t have to take anything out of bags. Maybe they have the new scanners already. Singapore was more strict, and they do the security c…

Australia is pretty lax, though they might swab you.

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Securing cockpit doors is what prevents the next 9/11. It was both necessary and sufficient.

Securing cockpit doors contributed to the death of 150 people however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 > Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft hit a mountainside.

Yes. Did they fix the doors/protocol in the meantime?

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#43
post #2

I don't know what kind of new scanner technology they have, but I noticed at Louis Armstrong International (MSY) they've dispensed with making you take your shoes off or pull your laptop out to be scanned separately. I hope they keep finding ways around this security theater malarkey.

[flagged]

The vax mandates have been around since the 1950s.

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#44
post #17

One of the few great benefits of going through Ben Gurion Airport in TelAviv is that due to their alternative approach to security (and profiling) noone gives a damn about your liquids. Want to go through the scanner holding a super gulp with a bag full of liquids? Go right ahead.

First rule at Ben Gurion is "don't be Arab" though. So maybe their "alternative approach" works for you, but it does have some downsides.

I think unlike the rest of the world, the Israeli's actually know they are actively being targeted. It's not a hypothetical. Politics aside, Palestinians match the Arabian profile and are an active threat. That really sucks if you are completely innocent and ethnically Arab and happen to travel that way of course but it is what it is. They simply are not going to take any chances. It's unfair, probably racist, and it works. And love them or hate them but they have kept a really clean record and that's not for a lack of people trying.

The Israeli's have perfected their airport security over the years and it's a multi layered system of intelligence, profiling, observation via camera's and no doubt lots of high tech. By the time you get to security, they know exactly who they are dealing with. You wouldn't get anywhere near there if that wasn't the case.

And as they've learned the hard way in Israel, security checkpoints can also be active targets. A lot of the gaza and west bank border crossings have been targeted in the past. Basically, any concentration of people is a potential target. So if somebody with a bomb makes it even close to a checkpoint, they've already lost. They need to catch people before that.

The chaotic scenes in European and US airports in the last decades where you regularly have thousands of people piling up in front of security checkpoints, kind of drives home just how low that particular threat actually is. It's a security nightmare. Yet it rarely goes wrong. There was an attack in Brussels airport a few years ago and it was pretty awful but that's one of the few times that actually happened. Otherwise what happens at airports is security theater. It's mostly not actually about security but about plausible deniability when things do go wrong.

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#45
post #16

I flew yesterday and in the plane realized I had some water from my daughter in the backpack. It was scanned and missed of course. And why wouldn't they miss it, it's a waste of time anyway. But at least they harassed a 3-year old to stand in a certain way to get scanned and fail at it. Unrelated, but I've come to believe it's a form of social welfare. So much policing for nothing, not just airports, wars on drugs et…

The term you're looking for is security theatre

Security theatre is a different thing. That’s when you perform a pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security. People coming up with onerous new rules and restriction just to remind you who’s in charge is something else.

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#46
post #36

I flew yesterday and in the plane realized I had some water from my daughter in the backpack. It was scanned and missed of course. And why wouldn't they miss it, it's a waste of time anyway. But at least they harassed a 3-year old to stand in a certain way to get scanned and fail at it. Unrelated, but I've come to believe it's a form of social welfare. So much policing for nothing, not just airports, wars on drugs et…

> wars on drugs etc I don't think we should be equating TSA with DEA and ATF. The latter two are practically military divisions operating domestically, the wars on drugs are unwinnable nebulous things by design to maintain these standing armies ripe for domestic abuse. TSA however does seem to be a security theater jobs program...

The war on drugs is as winnable as the war on murder or the war on petty theft. Just because it doesn't go away doesn't mean you failed at enforcing it.

War on drugs is just a shitty political campaign slogan everyone fell for. It's a fantastic one from the perspective of the politician, because they'd never be held accountable for 'losing' it during their tenure.

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#47
Recently at Stansted I had an encounter with a security staff member who was of the opinion that both clotted cream and butter were liquids. (Note, I wasn't the one trying to get either of these onto the plane.) Her entire argument seemed to rest on the case that they were spreadable. I don't think she did well in GCSE physics.

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#48
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were dozens of terror attacks against air travel in the 80s and 90s. The global post-9/11 "security theater" did make flying in the developing world much safer.

There's been dozens of hijackings since 9/11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#20...

To be fair there's been a lot less hijackings in the 2000s and 2010s compared with previous decades - although as the decline started in the 90's - its not likely to be solely due to increased security.

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#49

I flew yesterday and in the plane realized I had some water from my daughter in the backpack. It was scanned and missed of course. And why wouldn't they miss it, it's a waste of time anyway. But at least they harassed a 3-year old to stand in a certain way to get scanned and fail at it. Unrelated, but I've come to believe it's a form of social welfare. So much policing for nothing, not just airports, wars on drugs et…

It’s common for airports to allow liquids for babies/toddlers. Just take them out of the bag and put them in a padded box normally. No 100ml limit either- have taken regular water bottles through too (for milk formula). Various airports have different rules. Dubai was quite lax, you don’t have to take anything out of bags. Maybe they have the new scanners already. Singapore was more strict, and they do the security c…

Ugh, don't remind me of Singapore. Transferring after a flight from London, I see a water bottle refill fountain, which I use. We're running late, so I head straight to the gate...and then have to immediately dispose of my newly filled 2L water bottle.

I've never known another airport to have this security setup, and as a massive transit hub, I really can't make sense of why they chose to put it at that point - but then again, what of airport security actually makes sense when subjected to reasonable logic?

Re: UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Shoes and liquids are so 2000s. It's 2023, so it's all about masks and vax mandates What's wrong with COVID vaccine mandates? It sort of stops people from dying. Sure you can be annoyed at masks (I don't wear one, for instance), but vaccines ? You get poked a couple times and you're done. It's basically nothing and doesn't impact your life whatsoever. (Unless you have some sort of allergy or immune disorder of cour…

Mandating a medical treatment may be in some cases ethically acceptable, but it should only be done if absolutely necessary. In our current context, this is probably about the COVID vaccines. They don't seem to stop transmission, so mandating them on populations that aren't at risk is hard to justify.

Personally I think if someone only increases risk on themselves, it's the same as refusing cancer treatment or anything else, that's their choice. If it imposes risk on others there is some threshold where mandates might make sense, but I don't think we met it with COVID, given the insufficient safety and efficacy data we had at the time of the mandates. It seems for at least some populations it is a pretty risky (relatively, not absolutely) vaccine.

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