In case you hadn’t picked up on our apologies to security-types, we recanted of our rant against countries, airlines, airports who were (are) forcing passengers to check laptops in checked luggage. Apparently, cargo holds are designed to “blow out” leaving the passenger cabin intact. Yikes. So basically, countries and airlines are saying, “We can live without baggage if terrorists do the ultimate dirty deed. But we don’t want to expose this to our passengers.” So we picked up a Pelican Air case sized *just* big enough to drop our backpack (with laptop) inside. Granted, there’s still a chance that it wouldn’t make it to the final destination. But hey — if their intel is good, then we wouldn’t have made it anyway. So — thanks to the security types for watching out for us. We apologize for ranting about the inconvenience. At the end of the day, the inconvenience is the terrorists’ fault, not yours. Thanks to all those who responded to our rant — to straighten us out. : )
As someone who has worked with security and threat detection sensors professionally I have been sympathetic to this restriction since it’s inception. What I don’t get is how they feel good about stashing all those lithium batteries in the cargo hold. Some laptops have batteries ten times larger than the international regulations allow and since replacement batteries can be expensive and hard to find I kind of figure that a lot of laptop computers are out there with worn out batteries which are more likely to spontaneously combust than newish batteries. My two year old HP laptop was recently caught in the act of starting to burst its battery pack. I only caught it in time because I noticed that the Maxine went dead 45 minutes into a power failure. If that tree had not fallen when and where it did I never would have checked the batteries and my computer would have come to a bad end. Fortunately according to my IT people even though these packs do burst far too often they rarely catch fire and when they have the damage is confined to inside the laptop.