Brugge Blog

I had not been on an airplane since early 2000, so heightened airport security was just news stories to me. For our vacation, though, we were not only flying, but flying out of the country, so we were preparing ourselves and the kids for all of the non-flying standing around we would be doing.

As it turned out, we had a pleasantly easy trip from Chicago to Guatemala, the kids handling it all fine, and no mishaps. We left on August 9, and not being news junkies we didn’t seek out news sources (hey, this is vacation), and so we didn’t realize until four days later how close we had come to serious scares and headaches. I was talking with someone we met down there who was from the U.K., and he asked me what the safest way might be to pack his photo harddrive in checked baggage rather than carry-on, and when I looked at him puzzled he said “didn’t you hear about the terrorist plot?”

He laid out the basic, standard news story, and the new restrictions on liquids and gels to avoid someone being able to blow out a window with a couple of innocuous liquids Sounded scary, certainly.

By the time we came home last week the panic level had calmed a bit, but we still dutifully put all of our toothpaste and my son’s new hair gel in our checked luggage. The list of banned carry-on substances was still pretty lengthy and general, so at one checkpoint they even took away our lip balm (it wasn’t on the list I had seen, but I wasn’t about to argue). In all, the new checks didn’t slow us down very much, although it did leave the kids thirsty for a while. But there was that feeling that another method of terror had been at least partly thwarted for a while.

So then I come across a reference to an article in The Register about the plot, and I think I might finally learn something about what happened.

Here’s what I get from the article

• There is really no realistic way that blowing up planes with simple liquids was going to work.
• While this plot was nothing to be scared about, there are certainly others that we should be very scared about.

Now that we’re done flying for another couple of years, these stories recede back towards “just news stories”. Or they start to accumulate into more reasons that Sara will never want to fly again ever.