PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

cookie said, i'm gonna cry, and i said, hell, i'm gonna cry too

2007-12-29 - 10:23 a.m.

photo © 2007 by elaine radford

this incident i describe didn't happen at this small airport, but hey, that's the airport where i snapped a photo of the colorful plane, i think this is the airport where there was the time of departure scrawled on a chalkboard and if you missed it, heck, you missed it, that's the flight of the day, folks

The madness has to stop. What to my wondering eye did appear this morning but this nifty little notice that, as of January 1, there will be a ban on lithium batteries and they can't even be placed in your checked luggage. Of course, in effect, since screeners are often improperly trained, it will mean a randomly imposed ban on all batteries. Including alkalines. How do I know this? Because it already happened to me.

On one of my flights in Madagascar, I was called to the loading area where they had inspected my bag and discovered that -- the horror! the horror! -- I had a solid pack of 16 alkaline batteries from WalMart, unopened and in the original packaging.

Much freaking-out-edness ensued. I'm trying to be polite and patient, but I'm also completely baffled. I've heard the bogus bullshit theory that some sufficiently talented terrorist could somehow create acid if he had some sufficient number of batteries, but guess what, this ain't gonna happen on a 55 minute flight -- most especially if the batteries are in the checked bag.

And while English may be the official language of aviation and all that, their English wasn't really good enough for me to figure out what the heck they were worried about. (And of course my French is worse. I do know one word of Malagasy but, hmm, that's not going to be much help either.) So here's the deal. Sure, they screened a dense, dark object on the X-ray. Sure, they had me come out and watch them open my bag. So far, so good, in fact, opening my checked bag in front of me is a courtesy that American screeners might do well to emulate. But once you see that the dense, dark object on the X-ray is indeed a harmless package of batteries, you wrap it up and move on.

Right? Right?

Second choice, if you actually think there's some odd chance that a terrorist is going to overpower the plane with a pack of alkaline batteries, you throw the batteries away.

Right? Right?

Nope.

In the event, after it became clear that I was completely baffled about what they wanted me to do, the lady who had escorted me to the baggage handling bay took my carry-on, unzipped my bag, and put the batteries there. In my carry-on. "Very dangerous," she said. OK. Very dangerous. But only in the cargo hold. Perfectly safe in the overhead bin. Sure. Gotcha.

Well, I figured that there was something wrong somewhere, and now I know what it is. They got some memo that lithium batteries are not to be placed in checked baggage. And, after some squinting and wrestling and games of telephone with various translations from various languages, they interpeted that to mean that no batteries of any kind could travel in the cargo hold.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I just know that I'm going to end up stranded somewhere with no batteries for my camera and no place to buy any. Not to mention that there is never time for shopping anyway. And what's worse is when they figure it out and actually start seizing people's back-up lithium batteries. Those things aren't cheap.

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