Monday, November 05, 2001
Traveling around the world in wartime- Australia, NZ, Fiji
Traveling around the world in wartime
This family has just returned from a trip that exceeded the circumference of the Earth (24,000 miles) by some 4,000 miles and involved 12 flights, taking us through Australia, New Zealand and Melanesia. To answer the most frequently asked question first, about security, it was confidence-inspiring. The suggestions made by the President and Mayor Giuliani that Americans need not be afraid of travel and should resume normal activities make a great deal of sense. To begin with, no terrorist will get away again with waving a smuggled knife or even gun, or a pretend bomb, and asking the passengers not to do anything stupid, that the hijacking is a political statement and that the airplane is being returned to the airport. That worked with the early flights on 9/11. The "do not resist" policy advocated by airlines used to early hijacks with planes taken to Cuba no longer applies. Note that the heroic passengers on Flight xxx, hearing of the WTC destruction, rallied and forced the attackers to crash in the fields of Pennsylvania. Terrorists are not likely to try this venue, heir advantage is gone. And now we have some air marshalls, and pilots will not open the cockpit doors, no matter what the threat.
But this is logic, and I should talk facts, about the hardening of access to flights, in the US and abroad. Nowadays getting on board a plane is difficult and time-consuming, but we were thankful for the security, although it made our lives painful. Sometimes we felt profiled for extra searches, but that is all for the good. There were Smiths and Browns in the pat-down group, not just people with strange names and Mideastern appearances.
To begin with, the routine searches were thorough. Checked luggage was x-rayed and carry-on bags were searched by hand after passing through the machines. The US, Australian and Fiji governments now own several dangerous items that we once called ours. The JFK Airport searchers found our inch-long curved nail scissors in the hand luggage and took them away. Our fault, should have reviewed the contents of the toiletries case before packing. The extra search to which we were summoned just before boarding involved being patted down with electronic wands, arms and legs spread, and another hand-search of the luggage. That effort unearthed a pair of knitting needles, in the bottom of the bag, obscured by the seam. They are a no-no, whether metal, plastic, wood or flexible, and would have been confiscated by the flight attendants anyway. No chance to while away the long ocean flight hours with the creation of a sweater. A nail clipper was found acceptable, since it has no points to speak of.
We thought ourselves secure, until our arrival in Sydney and transfer to a domestic flight. There the Qantas body searchers, under a stricter application of the same rules, confiscated not only the nail clipper found harmless by JFK people but also found another, with a fold-out nail file, clearly a weapon. Facing a total loss of hand-care resources, I thought of another out, by way of placing the dangerous tools in our book bag and adding that to the checked luggage. It worked.
Being careful, we managed not to lose any more property until our departure from Nadi Airport in Fuji, on our way to LA. The round-headed tweezers heretofore deemed harmless, in the toiletry case, were declared not permissible, and Air Pacific packed them separately, to be retrieved in LA. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed two hours - AP, Qantas and another carrier had combined three thinly booked flights into one, which reduced our transfer time to an LA-NY flight to one hour, not enough for pasing through immigration, agriculture, customs and luggage search, not to speak of retrieving a small toiletry item. We missed the flight by twenty minutes, and AP had to put us up, along with three other couples, in day rooms at the airport Sheraton, which gave us a few hours of sleep, not to be frittered away chasing lost tweezers.
Such flight plan changes were happening all along. We ended up in a day room in Sydney for ten hours when Qantas rearranged our flight to Christchurch, NZ, due to the sudden bankruptcy of Australia’s domestic Ansett,Airlines but would not pick up the costs of the rooms. That had to be done by our tour supplier, Vantage Worldwide, an honorable company with superb tour guides.
A weird wartime casualty was a section of our tour, held up in LA for two hours because a pair of Mideastern travelers had an argument that involved the mention of terrorists. They were detained, and the entire luggage compartment had to be evacuated, in order to remove their suitcases. I also recall an Aeroflot flight detained forever at JFK when a passenger with a boarding pass failed to be seated, and the flight was endangered, with his checked lugage on board. I never found out how that ended, we left before them.
Incidentally, on-board magazines are a thing of the past, BYO reading material, and airplane meals have shrunk, in frequency and contents. The Qantas utensils still feature metal forks and spoons, but the knives are plastic.
This family has just returned from a trip that exceeded the circumference of the Earth (24,000 miles) by some 4,000 miles and involved 12 flights, taking us through Australia, New Zealand and Melanesia. To answer the most frequently asked question first, about security, it was confidence-inspiring. The suggestions made by the President and Mayor Giuliani that Americans need not be afraid of travel and should resume normal activities make a great deal of sense. To begin with, no terrorist will get away again with waving a smuggled knife or even gun, or a pretend bomb, and asking the passengers not to do anything stupid, that the hijacking is a political statement and that the airplane is being returned to the airport. That worked with the early flights on 9/11. The "do not resist" policy advocated by airlines used to early hijacks with planes taken to Cuba no longer applies. Note that the heroic passengers on Flight xxx, hearing of the WTC destruction, rallied and forced the attackers to crash in the fields of Pennsylvania. Terrorists are not likely to try this venue, heir advantage is gone. And now we have some air marshalls, and pilots will not open the cockpit doors, no matter what the threat.
But this is logic, and I should talk facts, about the hardening of access to flights, in the US and abroad. Nowadays getting on board a plane is difficult and time-consuming, but we were thankful for the security, although it made our lives painful. Sometimes we felt profiled for extra searches, but that is all for the good. There were Smiths and Browns in the pat-down group, not just people with strange names and Mideastern appearances.
To begin with, the routine searches were thorough. Checked luggage was x-rayed and carry-on bags were searched by hand after passing through the machines. The US, Australian and Fiji governments now own several dangerous items that we once called ours. The JFK Airport searchers found our inch-long curved nail scissors in the hand luggage and took them away. Our fault, should have reviewed the contents of the toiletries case before packing. The extra search to which we were summoned just before boarding involved being patted down with electronic wands, arms and legs spread, and another hand-search of the luggage. That effort unearthed a pair of knitting needles, in the bottom of the bag, obscured by the seam. They are a no-no, whether metal, plastic, wood or flexible, and would have been confiscated by the flight attendants anyway. No chance to while away the long ocean flight hours with the creation of a sweater. A nail clipper was found acceptable, since it has no points to speak of.
We thought ourselves secure, until our arrival in Sydney and transfer to a domestic flight. There the Qantas body searchers, under a stricter application of the same rules, confiscated not only the nail clipper found harmless by JFK people but also found another, with a fold-out nail file, clearly a weapon. Facing a total loss of hand-care resources, I thought of another out, by way of placing the dangerous tools in our book bag and adding that to the checked luggage. It worked.
Being careful, we managed not to lose any more property until our departure from Nadi Airport in Fuji, on our way to LA. The round-headed tweezers heretofore deemed harmless, in the toiletry case, were declared not permissible, and Air Pacific packed them separately, to be retrieved in LA. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed two hours - AP, Qantas and another carrier had combined three thinly booked flights into one, which reduced our transfer time to an LA-NY flight to one hour, not enough for pasing through immigration, agriculture, customs and luggage search, not to speak of retrieving a small toiletry item. We missed the flight by twenty minutes, and AP had to put us up, along with three other couples, in day rooms at the airport Sheraton, which gave us a few hours of sleep, not to be frittered away chasing lost tweezers.
Such flight plan changes were happening all along. We ended up in a day room in Sydney for ten hours when Qantas rearranged our flight to Christchurch, NZ, due to the sudden bankruptcy of Australia’s domestic Ansett,Airlines but would not pick up the costs of the rooms. That had to be done by our tour supplier, Vantage Worldwide, an honorable company with superb tour guides.
A weird wartime casualty was a section of our tour, held up in LA for two hours because a pair of Mideastern travelers had an argument that involved the mention of terrorists. They were detained, and the entire luggage compartment had to be evacuated, in order to remove their suitcases. I also recall an Aeroflot flight detained forever at JFK when a passenger with a boarding pass failed to be seated, and the flight was endangered, with his checked lugage on board. I never found out how that ended, we left before them.
Incidentally, on-board magazines are a thing of the past, BYO reading material, and airplane meals have shrunk, in frequency and contents. The Qantas utensils still feature metal forks and spoons, but the knives are plastic.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 5:16 AM 
