aeroplanes  — a blog about airport security, and luggage.

I bought this little bag in a shop near the airport at Newark.  It’s made of red canvas and has “Newark” printed on it in white letters.  It’s for carrying magazines or documents.  That’s what I’d planned to use it for.

Instead, it has become my carry-on bag when I fly.  Nowadays, when I travel, I put everything into this bag except my passport and the clothes I’m wearing.

The first time I used it, something strange happened.  I packed my laptop into the bag, and checked it in, as usual — that is to say, I carried the bag through security and put it inside my checked luggage before going onto the plane.

Then at the other end, when I got off the plane — instead of having to go and find my bags at baggage claim — there was my little red bag sitting right next to me on the floor!

I don’t know why they did that: they have no obligation to do so. But they did. And now every time I fly they do it again!

I imagine that once upon a time someone found some undeton

Aeroplanes is a blog about airport security, and luggage.

It has been running since 2011 and receives up to 100,000 unique readers a month.

Aeroplanes is an informative blog on airport security and luggage.

The blog is written by two brothers, Rob and Andrew, who share a love of travel and a passion for aviation. They have flown over 50 airlines combined, and have visited almost 25 countries across five continents.

In this blog they plan to share their stories, as well as tips for flying to various destinations across the globe.

We’ve been writing a blog about airport security and luggage. It’s called aeroplanes , because we believe that the best way to improve airport security is to make it more like flying an aeroplane.

Most people who fly on commercial aircraft are not pilots, but we assume they know enough about aeroplanes to have a reasonable idea what is going on. They can tell if the microphone in front of them is turned on or off, for example. As a result, passengers can usually tell when the flight attendant is talking to them, and when she’s talking to the pilot. When she starts with “Ladies and gentlemen,” you know she’s talking to you; when it’s “Ladies and gentlemen,” you know she’s talking over the intercom (or perhaps via text message).

Security in airports seems designed for passengers who know as little about security as most people do about aeroplanes. Airport security workers talk over our heads constantly, forcing us into situations we don’t understand. That might work if we were only being moved through the airport, but people are too smart for that now. We’re used to having some idea what is going on, so it’s natural for us to feel that if we understood how airport security worked, things would

Hi!

I’m Mike, a British blogger and software developer from Manchester.

I started this blog in November 2012 to write about the things I love: airport security, and luggage.

In early 2013 I started writing about a number of other topics too: travel, personal finance, technology and video games.

Not everything on this blog is directly related to airports or luggage. My personal finance posts are mainly about how I’m saving money for an around-the-world trip; my tech posts talk about what I’m working on professionally; and my video game posts are just me talking about which games I’m playing right now.

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch via the contact form.

For a very long time I have been interested in how luggage gets lost and what happens to it. (For reasons I will explain later, I tend to use the word “luggage” rather than “baggage”.) In particular, I want to know why airlines lose so much of it.

As airlines get better at moving airplanes around the sky, they seem to be getting worse at looking after the passengers’ belongings. Stories abound of passengers arriving at their destination only to discover that their luggage has not.

In June 1999, British Airways lost all the luggage of its entire Concorde fleet during a computer systems switchover. The cause was simple incompetence; but even when airlines are not incompetently run, they can still lose more suitcases in a few days than most people will lose in their lifetime. For example, about 10% of all luggage is never returned to its owner after a short-haul flight on British Airways.

A few days ago, I was going through airport security in the US, and had my luggage inspected. In the process, I was asked to open up a package I had in my luggage. So I did, and it turned out that it was a pair of shoes. The screeners suggested that because of the aluminum coating on the heels of the shoes, they might set off the alarm and need to be scanned separately.

I mentioned that this was a new and unusual reason to scan shoes separately (since when did screening become so sensitive that you could detect metal with an aluminum coating?), but nevertheless agreed to have them scanned separately.

Five minutes later, after my luggage had already passed through the x-ray machine and been put on the other side of security, I received a phone call from a screener asking me to come back to the x-ray machine and retrieve my shoes.

Dutifully, I turned around and walked back. After showing my boarding pass yet again (which is itself an annoyance for people who have just gotten off an airplane), waiting for someone to find the key for my bag lock, retrieving my shoes from the x-ray machine, putting them back into a bin, going through security again… I finally made it back to where