The Daily Parker

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EU phasing out liquid restrictions

By 2013, the EU will stop confiscating your lunch:

Liquids, gels and aerosols will instead be run through a new generation of explosives scanners able to screen them for harmful materials. Getting these machines up and running will be very expensive, and the technology is not yet foolproof. But nothing in aviation security is foolproof, and anything is better than the chaotic confiscation policies now in place.

Why are the Europeans always one step ahead of us?

... The 3-ounce container rule is silly enough -- after all, what's to stop somebody from carrying several small bottles, each full of the same substance -- but consider for a moment the hypocrisy of TSA's confiscation policy. At every concourse checkpoint you'll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? So why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it's going to take them anyway, and either you accept it or you don't fly.

Smith also, bless him, acknowledges another problem with the US enforcement regime: "The maximum allowable container size is actually 3.4 ounces, by the way, or a hundred milliliters."

In other aviation news, United is eating Continental. That will cause American to eat USAirways, leaving only three major airlines in the US, and a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index climbing to heaven. Lovely.

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