Re: Getting Looping Gear through US Homeland Airport Security

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 3:12 AM, Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:
> Arrrrrrgggggghhhhhh,

Last month I got caught when arriving to SFO San Francisco.

I passed the security check fine but as I was waiting for my checked
bag to come out a specially trained Security Dog leaped right at me
and froze with its nose marking my cabin bag (containing flute, laptop
and audio interface). The dog's man, an uniformed armed security
officer, politely asked me if I had "food in my luggage", which I
didn't think I had, until I remembered I had not eaten all my
Scandinavian apples during the flight. So that was it. The guy kindly
offered to toss my apples for me. No big deal, I soon found a lovely
Californian fruit bowl to make up for the loss.

Much worse last time when my 1929 tenor sax was "tagged as suspicious
luggage and transported to a safe area for termination if not claimed
by the owner within thirty minutes". During those thirty minutes no
one informed me about where my checked in sax bag had gone. I found
out by pure luck ("luck" here means running around SFO like a maniac
asking any staff member about the missing sax case and finally
entering the "restricted area" against the officer's order to grab the
instrument case and claim it).

I recently heard about security policies in Israel and it seems they
are handling it in a smarter way. Instead of hoping to be able to
empty the airport in case of a bomb is found (something that may take
two days) they have built bomb save rooms that all passengers have to
pass through for the security check. If "something dangarous" is found
on a passenger they will only have to empty and lock up that
particular room and the intermezzo will not cause harm to the rest of
the airport traffic.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com
www.looproom.com internet music hub