We can’t take a bottle of water on the aircraft, but we can take this?
With the United Kingdom now once again allowing laptops on aircraft, but the entire world banning liquids, we tend to question the decisions of the TSA and related organizations in their prohibited items list
Dell’s Battery Recall has brought to mind the danger of bring laptops on board. Battery issues are not limited to Dell’s however. This is what could happen should your battery catch fire, courtesy of Boingboing.net.
Obviously there is the potential for liquid explosives. Terrorists are clearly creative people. But we forget so easily that anything can be a weapon. The experts are jokingly predicting that soon we’ll be travelling naked. Perhaps we are not so far off from being stapped down and sedated for the duration of flight, or stripped naked and given hospital gowns to travel in.
There is reasonable security. But sometimes it seems as if the TSA’s methods lack definable and consistent logic.
Posted: August 16th, 2006 under Opinion, Security Roundup.
Comments
Pingback from Flight Wisdom » Is this Covered By Warranty?
Time September 17, 2006 at 12:48 am
[...] Last month, we questioned why we could take a laptop with a potentially dangerous battery on a plane but not a simple bottle of water. Obviously, the airlines have been following our blog, Techfreep reports that yesterday, Virgin Atlantic announced that passengers with any Dell or Apple laptops will not be allowed to use the laptop in flight. The announcement stated that passengers may carry on the laptops, but the battery must be properly wrapped and stowed away in carry-on for the flight. [...]
Pingback from Gadget Wisdom » Protect Yourself from Burnout
Time September 1, 2006 at 3:47 pm
[...] Our colleagues at Flight Wisdom wrote a few weeks ago here about the danger of laptop battery issues. Dell was followed by Apple in its battery recall. As this article from Business Week reports, the online community kept pressure on the manufacturers to do something about this. And now Dell and Apple are recalling over 5 million batteries. But the danger of computer components isn’t limited to batteries, as one writer reports here. His hard drive burnt out in what appears to be a rather dramatic manner. [...]