There actually is a 2″ gun!!

The Canadian Air Transport Security stopped a woman wearing a 1-inch pistol pendant and made her stash it in her checked luggage. When they said

“How do you know it wasn’t a real gun?” asked Guy, a security agent with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, who also declined to provide his last name.

“Who knows if there is a gun that small that can shoot bullets? You don’t know that. They followed the rules.”

Bloggers ridiculed them.

Now we find out that there really is small gun (only 2-inches long) that can kill!!

The SwissMiniGun is the size of a key fob but fires tiny 270mph bullets powerful enough to kill at close range.

Officially the world’s smallest working revolver, the gun is being marketed as a collector’s item and measures just 2.16 inches long (5.5cm). It can fire real 4.53 bullets up to a range of 367ft (112m).

Who woulda thunk it.

Free pot at Tokyo Airport

Tokyo customs agents managed to lose around four ounces of marijuana during a training session with drug-sniffing dogs. It seems that the dog didn’t sniff so well and the customs agent forgot into what bag’s side pocket he slipped the testing packet.

According to the BBC:

An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan’s Narita airport has received 142g of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.

A customs officer hid a package of the banned substance in a side pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase in order to test airport security.

Sniffer dogs failed to detect the cannabis and the officer could not remember which bag he had put it in.

Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials.

Right. Maybe, they could use some of those RFID chips I spoke about last week.

Embedding passengers with ID chips

Discussions have been swirling about tagging checked luggage with small chips that will help keep them on the right flights and eliminate lost luggage. But now, tagging has been proposed for passengers at airports to keep them from missing flights and helping to find lost children.

A British site, carrentals.co.uk, notes

University College London electronic engineer, Paul Brennan is leading work on the EU-funded Optag system. He said it combines high resolution panoramic video imaging with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to enhance airport security, safety and efficiency. According to Brennan; “It would work if each passenger were issued with a tag, which could allow location to about one metre accuracy,” he said. “The video and tag data can be merged to give a very powerful surveillance capability.”

Embedding passengers with computer chips has been suggested before and some companies are now working on bluetooth systems that will track passengers through airline terminals.

It’s coming. That’s for sure. Now we need to figure out how to make it work to make life easier at the airport.

FAA – AA tit for tat

It was only a matter of time for the bureaucracy to strike back at American Airlines for their claim that the inspectors and executives at the FAA reneged on a deal that would give the airline more time to fix the wiring problems with the MD-80s.

The Washington Post reports that

Maintenance work by American Airlines on hundreds of jets was so sloppy that it posed a safety risk — a lapse that forced the carrier to ground many of its planes and strand hundreds of thousands of passengers last month, according to a report by federal regulators released yesterday.

The truth is somewhere in between. Heck, AA was the one that originally wrote the service bulletins that caused the whole stir. They followed their own guidelines, but didn’t quite manage to follow the tweaks that the FAA inserted later.

There is argument about the chaos caused by the mass cancellations of flights. However, the hiccup is still reverberating through the airline this month’s on-time stats are still some of the lowest in the airline’s history — around 50 percent!

Buddy passes = toilet paper?

A post on Chris Elliott’s blog notes that the buddypass the Jet Blue passenger was using to fly when wasn’t worth much more than toilet paper. Of course he is getting a chance to make a bundle from the buddy pass since he has now sued and will end up with some sort of settlement.

However buddy passes come in various shapes and sizes so to speak.
The lowest level puts those using them at the bottom of the ticketing world. Amazingly, some of the tickets with the lowest priorities end up costing about the same as an advanced-purchase ticket. The benefit (if you can get a seat on the plane) is the ability to travel at the last minute.
The perk tickets that airline folk get as employees or family members have far better priority for boarding and are free in many cases for coach travel. They are still a good perk, but not as easy to use as before.