Posts Tagged ‘ liquids in hand baggage ’

According to Grant Shapps, the new transport boss, you won’t have to take laptops and liquids from your bags. Or your sockas and underwear!

For those of us who can remember before liquids were a problem in hand luggage a return to those days will be bliss.

You might remember that CD-Traveller announced that there would be some changes in what you were allowed to carry as hand luggage. Forget it. No change is going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Why?

As most of you are aware, you need to put liquids, gels and thing like lipsticks into plastic bags before you go through security at airports. At BAA airports (Heathrow, Stansted, Southampton, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh) as well as Gatwick, Inverness, Cardiff, Leeds Bradford, Humberside and the two Belfast airports you don’t have to pay if you’ve forgotten a plastic bag. But at Birmingham, East Midlands, Luton, Manchester and Newcastle you pay. yes, you actually pay for a plastic bag. And it’s spreading.

Don’t get too excited. It’s not happening tomorrow. The EU announced a little while ago- June I think – that the ban on carrying liquids in hand luggage would go in 2013. Now, the transport secretary, Philip Hammond, has said it will end in the UK too. Also in 2013. Nothing surprising in that as there is supposed to be uniformity across the EU. Why it should take another 2-3 years if they have already decided to do away with the problem must be down to the length of time it takes to install new machines that can detect tampered liquids but it still seems a long way off. If we screamed security I bet the kit would be in place in months.
No, the interesting feature of Hammond’s statement was that the ban would start being phased out from April.