I had a bag of coffee taken. It was from a company called “Doomsday” and had a logo of a gas mask on the bag. It was very clearly labeled as whole bean coffee, but TSA deemed it too unsafe.
A water bottle with shards of ice in it that had melted partially. I’m being dead ass serious, btw. Happened to me at Louisville airport.
curious, why was there ice in your bottle?
Wow ok I have two. The first is long.
I moved to the Netherlands in 1991, and in the spring of 1992 my parents asked me to come home for a visit because my grandmother was dying. Which sucked.
Anyway I think I’m going to be the cool kid and smuggle some of this sweet Dutch weed back to the States. But how? Checked luggage, no control. Something on my person but not obvious? Yeah, that’s the ticket, so I stuffed my longest glove finger full of dank weed and put in my overcoat pocket thinking I could drop it without notice if things looked bad.
I land at Hartsfield and go to get my checked luggage, my weed infested glove in my overcoat pocket thrown over the back of the luggage trolly. There is this cute girl in a uniform with a beagle on a leash. The dogs starts walking toward the luggage trolly, and I’m getting nervous. He has a big old sniff and the cute girl gives him a treat. She walks up to me and says, “Sir, do you have any …fruit?”
I’m trying very hard to play it cool, but I’m sure I was not. My then girlfriend now wife had put a banana in the other overcoat pocket so I’d “eat healthy.” I answered yes, I have a banana and she says, “Then you’ll have to go to Agricultural Customs.”
Which at that time was in the basement of Hartsfield. There is only one counter with two official dudes behind it and my hand to god, two dudes with a fucking goat. These four have a very long back and forth until one of the dudes makes a call, and this other dude comes down and starts speaking French to the Two Men and a Goat. All’s well, the dudes and their goat are free to go.
[The entire time about 50m away there were constant patrols with the actual drug dogs, the german Shepards walking past me while I’m thinking fuck they are going to catch me, put me in a hole and sodomize me.]
I walk up to the two dudes at the counter and they ask me what I have. I pull out the banana which is pretty banged up at this point. They asked if I wanted to eat it, and I said no, so they directed me to a trash can behind them told me to throw it away and be on my way.
The great irony is when I finally got home to SC my mom had scored what turned out to the best weed any of us had ever smoked, and my nearly-failed career as a drug mule was all for naught.
The second one happened recently. I was going to my company’s office party at their HQ in Cyprus, flying out of Schiphol (Amsterdam). My bag goes through the scanner, gets sent down the “we gonna open this son” track. The dude points at my suitcase and asks what is on this side of it. I open it and show him one full half of the suitcase is filled with this https://www.oetker.nl/recepten/r/gevulde-speculaas which are rectangular stuffed pastry things we eat around the feast of St Nicolas (eve).
He pointed at them and looked at me somberly and said, “This is bad, very bad.” I said, Ummm, they are just treats for my coworkers." He looked at me, back down, and said “This is forbidden, you are in trouble.” Then he said nothing and I said nothing and then he busted into laughter.
He said, “I’m just fucking with you man. Under the scanner those look exactly like C-4.”
So for any Dutch traveling around xmas, many don’t bring those with you.
That was a great read friend! It made me laugh at least twice.
Not really useless, and I volunteered it for disposal… a small LED torch. I was entering New Zealand, which has extremely strict biohazard rules. I remembered that I’d used the torch a few times while beekeeping in the UK. The risk was vanishingly small, but still a risk, so I handed it over and it went in the bin.
My sister knows I like knives. She went to Switzerland with her husband and bought a Victorinox for me. I think it was at the airport so she didn’t had the chance to check in with her luggage. TSA equivalent at her layover in India confiscated it. She was livid.
I had a torx handle with a single screw driver bit attached, left over in my backpack. (So basically just a screwdriver)
Combined, it barely exceeded the maximum safety length. If I’d stored it separated, it would have been fine.
I offered to separate it, that wasn’t going to work. I needed to leave one of them behind. …as the rest of the socket set (at home) needed the torx handle, I left them with the screw driver bit.
Toothpaste
I had a full sized tube of toothpaste that had maybe one squirt left in it, and the TSA agent made me throw it away because the labeled size was bigger than 3oz.
I once bought a small tube of toothpaste for travel. I didn’t really check what was allowed by the airport, I just bought what looked small enough. I arrived at the airport, went through security, traveled to my destination and used the toothpaste during the week I was away.
When I was set to return my toothpaste was flagged at the airport. It was “too big”. I of course argued with the TSA agent that I had flown into this exact airport a week before with MORE toothpaste in the container than it had in it now. Of course there is no logic. Into the bin my mostly new toothpaste went.
A salt-shaker sized container of MSG
I traveled to a manufacturing expo last year. I had so much stuff to bring back that I needed extra room in my carry-on. So I loaded it up with these: box of drill bits and some endmills (very sharp), set of dial calipers, set of metal files, small containers of superglue, a couple books of sandpaper, set of precision pins for measuring holes (basically looks like a bed of nails in a box). Also I had a bottle of water. Yep the bottle was confiscated but they didn’t care about all the other crap even if it looked like MacGuiver was planning to hijack a plane.
I got an opposite kinda thing. I picked up one of those credit card sized folding knives. Forgot it was in my wallet, and wasn’t even stopped at TSA. Didn’t even realize it until a couple days after I landed at my destination.
It’s ALL theatre.
The other day I went to a block party/rave type event and security confiscated my new and unopened pack of gum but didn’t check or confiscate my full sized pack of alcohol wet wipes… anything could have been in that package, they didn’t even look, but my sealed gum was a possible threat??
not really theatre, it’s impossible to scan everything after all…
And yet they do scan everything.
I took my bike, but they confiscated my entire tyre patch / repair kit because it had an allen key in it. Apparently I might try to disassemble the plane from the inside or something. Then I learnt it’s surprisingly hard to find a tyre repair kit in my destination. Hooray
Never had an issue in the US. Coming back from Cozumel Mexico one of their security people was on a pair of micro wire cutters, had to empty most of a bag so she could “find” them. Then she took it to a supervisor who said it was fine so she gave them back and I wasted another 5 minutes repacking my bag wasting their space. I had flown down with them and passed through TSA again heading home without issue.
When I got to Cozumel they decided I needed extra screening because of all my cases. I was there to SCUBA dive. Woman in front of me lost like six cartons of cigarettes and had to pay a fine. Her husband passed through and was gone, she was pissed… Dude half ass checked my two cases, carry on bag, and personal item bag and sent me on my way.
I had a flight safe multitool, one that specifically had no blade, nor anything sharp. It only had tools for my camera. I also had a fisher space pen which they said looked too much like a bullet.
Both were confiscated, but they couldn’t figure out how to open the front flipper knife I had with me, so they let it through.
The TSA bullshit isn’t about keeping us safe.
Dude, I took a domestic flight recently and don’t have realid bullshit cause it’s not mandatory in my state and I renewed online during covid. Anyway, had to pay the $45 “security check” (only good for 10 days) to TSA to board. Husband got through with a box cutter, I got held up because I had money they wanted.
3 days later I’m verifying a Costco membership, their questions asked where I lived in 1988. It was harder to verify my identity at Costco than get a box cutter through TSA. It’s a fucking money grab joke. It didn’t even verify anything except my card had $45 they could charge me.
How about not confiscated?
Was in New Orleans for the Jazz Festival.
My wife gets headaches, so we brought an ice bag like this one:
In the morning we fill it with ice in our hotel, and toss it in a backpack. We empty the water at the end of the day.
On the last day, we gather our luggage and gear and head to the airport.
When we got home I realized that my backpack went through the airport scanners with the ice bag full of water. Probably about a quart.
I think that might be above what’s allowed.
Some scanners are modern enough to be able to differentiate between water and non-permitted liquids.
I was able to bring a 1L (33floz) on a plane from FRA.
It just needed to go through the scanner. Same with carry-on.
A bottle of water.
