[Leica] Re: Thoughts about cameras and the new aviation rules

["Eric" <ericm@pobox.com>]

Adam:

>But if anyone has braved the new security and has suggestions for doing
>things right and easier I'd love to hear suggestions.

My brother and his wife just flew back from Las Vegas.  (They were lucky.
They weren't planning on returning until Friday.  They actually made it back
on Saturday.)

In the Vegas airport, they stood in line for about 3 hours on Friday around
noon.  They made it to Phoenix, where they stood in line for about an hour
at 5a Saturday!  I would not have suspected the lines would have been quite
so long at that time of morning.  So my advice would be to plan on arriving
extremely early.  Even more so if you have film that you want examined by
hand.

When they got back home yesterday, I asked about security.  Everything was
going slower, but my brother said nothing was really out of the ordinary.
They were allowed carry-on bags.  The security people were interested in
carefully inspecting the paperback book my brother was carrying on.  We both
thought that was weird.

Something that has worked well for me in the past is to remove all the film
from the individual packaging and store it "naked" in ziplock bags.  I'm
careful to make sure the film cassettes are just one deep in the bag.  The
ziplock bags can be easily examined without opening them.

If I were flying now, I'd probably limit myself to a dozen or two rolls of
film and plan on getting more film at my destination.


Eric