Does it make sense to you that you can't carry on a bottle of conditioner, hand cream, water or soda (over 3 oz) on a plane but yet you are allowed to carry on a small knife?

Liquids are easily disguised as harmless while they can really be volatile substances, ready to explode at any moment or when another “harmless” agent is slipped into the bottle. Knives are knives. You can’t exactly disguise them as something else and then suddenly pull them out and start stabbing people.

Even if I was on board with a small pocket knife, I wouldn’t be playing with it in my seat.

The whole thing is a sham, aimed at scaring people into giving up their freedoms, one by one. RESIST!

Some liquids are extremely reactive to different things, like bleach an ammonia (which can be compressed into a liquid). When mixed together, bleach and ammonia will form a toxic gas. That’s why you’re not supposed to clean your toilets with bleach.

No, it doesn’t.

In Australia you can’t even take a sewing needle on let alone a small knife.

None of these petty rules makes any sense. They are at best designed to protect us from an attack that (1) already happened in the past, and (2) was actually foiled. However, there doesn’t appear to be a way of making TSA be reasonable. Hopefully, as time goes on, they’ll lose interest in these kinds of regulations and start being less fussy about what we carry on.

This is a perfect example of feel-good, knee jerk reactions to appease the sheeple.

I think the reasoning is that it’d be awfully hard to kill someone with one of those little knives. Of course, if you had, say, 10 terrorists armed with tiny knives on your flight, they could still do a lot of damage. Liquids, on the other hand, can be made into explosives or toxic gasses, as has been pointed out, knocking out or blowing up a bunch of people at once.

I think this is actually their attempt to undo some of the feel-good, knee jerk reactions they’ve had in the past. I’m on the fence about whether it’s a good idea or not.

@Arewethereyet, I was just about to point that out too. I had to pack a pointy wine stopper in our luggage and they made me put some florists butterflies on wire in the hold.

HEre you can take water or soda onto the plane but you have to buy it in the secure area of the airport after you have been through the security checks.

I just read an article from the former head of the TSA. The bottom line is that you can’t hijack an airplane with a pocket knife since they’ve reinforced the doors. You could blow the thing up with liquid explosives however. A terrorist might be able to stab and kill a handful of people on a plane, but eventually he’s getting pinned down by everyone else. But killing a few people on a plane is hardly a major threat to national security, they could easily accomplish the same thing by stabbing people in an elevator, and it’s not like we need security checkpoints at every elevator entrance.

There are limits to what is reasonable to protect against. By focusing their attention on the threats that could crash the plane, and not every possible item that could conceivably harm other passengers, the TSA is going to be spending their limited resources and energy on defending against the greatest threats (which is as it should be).

You should be able to carry anything on a plane at all which the owner of the plane and yourself agree on. The government shouldn’t be telling me when I can or cannot bring a douche bottle into someone else’s vehicle.

@Bellatrix yes my friend used to quilt her way around the world but now she wonders what she’ll do… Having said that one of my clients recently told me her secret… Tape the sewing needle to the inside arm of your eye glasses… She’s in her 70s what a rebel!

It’s OK, I plan on taking out the terrorists with my crochet needles.