I just got back from Haiti where I was doing some stuff for our orphanage down there.
I took a Hammy practice flute along figuring it to be the most bullet proof flute in the world.
The TSA security guys were a bit alarmed about it. “This is pretty formidable…nice handle too” says the guy slapping his palm with the pipe with obvious admiration. I assured him it was a musical instrument. He had his supervisor come over so I could play some tunes to prove it. I did so and he responded “That’s really cool!” Though I think he felt the appeal of a club that could make music more than a flute that looked like a club.
My toothpaste was another matter. They reasoned that that was decidedly dangerous as, no matter how I squeezed it, I couldn’t get “Fig for a Kiss” to come out. Oh well, The world is surely a safer place without it.
Must sing the praises of the HPF though…killer flute. I had a blast playing in airports from here to Haiti. The kids at the orphanage really liked it too.
Several times I walked into a room with several little ones crying and started to play. There was immediate silence and all the little eyes opened wider than seemed possible…They really liked it.
Must say though, it’s tough to play flute when you’ve got 70 or 80 little bugs trying to poke their fingers into the bore and holes while you’re tooting. Harmonica would likely be easier.
Nah, they’d just find somewhere else to poke - much closer and more intimate in the case of a “bogling iron”, as a studiedly eccentric old mate of mine used to call 'em. (Pronounced to rhyme with “ogling”, not “boggling”.)
Nice story about the airline security, though. Must say, when I’ve travelled abroad over the last couple of years I’ve been amazed not to have been asked to explain my hand luggage rucksack full of flutes. There is no way the average airport scanner operator knows what those wooden tubes with holes and metal bits in a case are! (Especially my R&R Patent Head with all its solid brass work.) And they could most assuredly be adapted (or at least, something similar looking could be disguised thus) as some kind of air-powered dart gun! I haven’t even been asked what they might be save once. - Funnily enough, the only time I’ve been asked to open instrument cases and show contents was going to Ireland to Hammy Hamilton’s Flute Meeting in Spring 2006!
I’ve often wondered what they would do to a guy that tried to take a full set of Uilleann pipes on a plane. Then they’d be really sorry if they insisted on a tune!
"No really guys, just a few more minutes and I’ll have these regs tuned. Then we can get to work on the drones. "
I would damned well insist they sit through at least one whole set for my trouble. And they’d better hold the flight, too.
The first time I had to encounter the flute-as-security-risk thing was the Saturday right after the Sept. 11 attacks. The security official came off as a self-important boob for whom, despite his boobosity, I was only too happy to play a tune, but he made me stop because his assistants started dancing. Obviously he had all the taste of a roll of duct tape.
Retired manager of local airport told me the other day - in the 70’s they got hand held metal detectors to sweep the passengers. Staff complained though that the things were too sensitive - being set off by a single coin etc. So manager says he’ll get them ‘calibrated’.
He kept them in a drawer for a week, then took the batteries out and gave them back ‘recalibrated’. Everyone was happy and the detectors were used like that for six years!
Someone else told me that (again in the 70’s) they had to take someone in a car to catch the plane but they were very late. When they got there the plane was taxi-ing to the runway, so the airport staff let him drive down the centre of the runway to prevent the plane taking off and give him time to get his passenger aboard!
I got pulled aside once; had the three piece flute overlaying my ipod and headphones in my carry-on. After a few minutes of terse exchange, and as the misunderstanding cleared, they showed me the x-ray. Looked like three sticks of dynamite with wires crossing the head tube cork (or detinator as they assumed). On the other end of the wires was my iPod “transmitter device”. I guess I was going to set these off from a mere 4 feet away. Glad they turned out to be a flute.
I’ve developed the habit now of removing the flute case from my carry-on so it can pass through separately.
They’re trying to keep us alive.
I’ve flown a good deal in countries where
there was a terrorist threat. Our security
is way too relaxed.
Nonsense. Prof. John Mueller has this to say regarding security and airline terrorism. Many of us fly with our flutes so this is relevant to the issue. And it is not sectarian politics.
"Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is "when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, or accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.
"Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.
"Thus far at least, terrorism is a rather rare and — in appropriate, comparative context — not a very destructive phenomenon. However, the enormous sums of money being spent to deal with the threat have in part been diverted from other, possibly more worthy, endeavors. The annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, for example, now tops $30 billion, while state and local governments spend additional billions.
"For instance, measures that delay airline passengers by half an hour could cost the economy $15 billion a year, calculates economist Roger Congleton.
“Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave.”
“In addition, it should be pointed out that the response to September 11 has created a vast and often well-funded terrorism industry. Its members would be nearly out of business if terrorism were to be back-burnered, and accordingly they have every competitive incentive (and they are nothing if not competitive) to conclude that it is their civic duty to keep the pot boiling.”
John Mueller holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University. His most recent book is The Remnants of War, Cornell University Press. He may be contacted by e-mail at bbbb@osu.edu.
A terrorist attack on the U.S. works much like the bite of a brown recluse spider: the venom only works for a few seconds, after that it’s your body’s own defenses that slowly kill you.
The terrorists are doubtlessly delighted; not only did they gain international recognition by their acts, they also managed to make real and lasting (but hopefully not permanent!) changes to our society.
All of that belongs on the controversial forum, though. To bring this thing back on topic…
When I fly I take my Seery flute, and I take it in my carry-on bag.
Without exception, I have been stopped and questioned about it. In each case, I wasn’t allowed to touch it or play it to prove with it is…they handled it (gingerly!), peered down it’s bore…one woman actually sniffed it. (It was clean; I really don’t know why the sniffing. Maybe she had blood-hound ancestry. )
In every case, they have finally allowed that it was a flute.
The longest of these flute inspections took almost half an hour while three security officers peered at it. One of them, a truly bright soul, kept saying “I don’t think that’s a flute. My sister played flute and it didn’t look anything like that.”
Maybe I should take a different flute next time?
Don’t even say the Hamilton, though…I don’t ever intend to fly with that flute, at least not until airport security regains a degree of sanity.
Perhaps she sniffed it because you had played it after eating some garlic.
Here’s a product idea: A roll-on fake silver flute skin to give your flute the appearance of being a regular flute like the kind Bubba’s sister used to play!
Here’s a security idea: Let’s make sure everyone in the world has enough to eat, clean water and a healthy environment.
The last time I flew was years ago to Mexico. On the way back one of the security people saw the fife and looked down the bore for who knows what. That was all. And I had learned to play the Mexican hat dance just in case. I have always been hesitant to bring my brass Mel Bay fife though, even though it is normally my travel instrument.
I tend to agree with David/Cocusflute and James/Peeplj. Regardless of the usefulness/good sense or otherwise of the whole business, what has amazed me on my own travels in the last two years, mostly between GB and Spain, given the fuss being made about security, is that when my carry-on bag containing several wooden flutes in cases has gone through the image scanner and been peered at by an operator, I haven’t (save the once I already mentioned) even been asked what they are! I’d expect such staff to recognise a modern metal flute because they must see quite a lot and they are a common-place item most people would be able to identify, but not my antique wooden ones which, as we frequently discuss, aren’t even recognised by many folk as flutes when being played. Surely, given their training and the present security climate, they should have their curiosity sufficiently raised by such strange looking objects that they should at least ask?
I’ve seen a variety of reactions from, “A flute?? Uh-huh. Sure. Riiiiiight…”, to genuine interest not of the security kind, to me pointing at the case before scanning, saying, “It’s a musical instrument,” and getting waved through with no questions asked.
The good professor is surely right that the number of Americans
killed in terrorist attacks since the 60s is low, averaged over all the years.
However this counts for little, as the pace increased extraordinarily
on 9/11, when 3000 people were killed in a few hours. Obviously
the security-response was to that extraordinarily
accelerated rate of fatalities.
It makes no sense to calibrate our security response to the fatality
rate that preceded 9/11, anymore than it would have to calibrate our
military response to Japanese aggression to the fatality rate that
preceded Pearl Harbor. Or to average that day’s losses
over the last 40 or fifty years and observe that death at
the hands of Japanese military amounted
on average to no more than lives lost to bee stings or shark attacks
or whatever, so why spend millions on battle ships?
The argument is based on a fallacious ‘thus far.’
‘Thus far at least, terrorism is a rather rare and — in appropriate, comparative context — not a very destructive phenomenon.’
It ain’t
‘thus far’ no more, sports fans. The terrorists have demonstrated
the will and the ability to kill thousands of us in a couple of hours.
That was the mortality rate that mattered, realistically.
If the risk of airlines-used-as-projectiles equaled that of traffic
related fatalities (one Sept 11 type episode a month, which
the terrorists certainly could arrange without stricter
security than we had in place),
that would mean 45,000 domestic airline related deaths a year,
3,500 a month, more or less, which would mean the end of the airline
airline industry and air travel, economic chaos, and a
far more profound change to life as we know it
than was putting in place the level of airline security that is already in
place throughout a good deal of the world.
Not to mention the deaths themselves!
No country on earth that faces this threat just informs
the public that it’s more cost effective to let the terrorists have
their way with airlines. Nor could a government that offered
them that option survive.
The McCain quote lacks a date–one supposes that JMc
is citing the effects of tightened security, not criticizing it.
The absence of the date is troubling. Grateful for citations
so we can read the whole piece you quote.
To put my cards on the table, I think our failed policies
in the middle east must be rectified before we can
win the ‘war on terror.’ But neither political party is willing to
address that effectively. Meanwhile
I really don’t want to die the way the folks did on
9/11. Call me irrational, I can’t help it, but I think
I speak for most everybody on this side of the Big Puddle.
As the security is there and we’re paying for it, and the threat
is there too,
the security might as well be arranged to actually
work. I think it should be at least as tight as it was in India.
To the people involved, I don’t mind the nuisance.
I thank anybody who is doing what she can to
keep me in one piece.
)