Chocolate Swiss Army Knife
It’s realistic looking. If I drop it in a bin with my keys and wallet, will the TSA confiscate it?
Comments
Sander Steffann • November 24, 2023 4:07 PM
That one has a wrapper. I prefer the spray painted chocolates like these https://chocinggood.nl/webshop/beroepen/chocolade-koksmes-met-aanzetstaal/ 🙂
It’s amazing how realistic chocolate objects can be!
Steve • November 24, 2023 4:08 PM
They only confiscate knives with blades over a certain length. And replicas. You should argue that this is a replica of a short-bladed knife but they’ll probably use their TSA omniscience to determine that the theoretical knife in question has a long blade.
Gnart • November 24, 2023 4:16 PM
They will confiscate, and use the real confiscated Swiss Army knives to divide the spoils 🙂
R.mcneil • November 24, 2023 5:01 PM
I used to cross the border from Canada to the USA frequently with my family, back in the days when one simply had to say one was Canadian to be let in. The American border guards would sometimes ask us if we had any fruits or vegetables, and there were a couple of times when they did confiscate some citrus fruit. I always suspected (though the sample size was too small to say with any certainty) that the probability of confiscation was related to how hungry they were.
I imagine the same will be true for chocolate knives. Ordinarily they’ll let them through with a laugh, but if you show up right before a lunch or dinner break when their blood sugar’s getting low, it’ll go right into their barrel of extremely dangerous (but not too dangerous to stand beside all day) items.
Clive Robinson • November 24, 2023 5:22 PM
@ ALL,
The joys of english,
1, Bread knife
2, Chocolate knife
The first is not edible, because it’s not made of bread, but is designed to cut bread.
The second is edible, because it’s made of chocolate, but is designed to not cut chocolate.
Try explaining it to people trying to learn the rules of the language[1]…
Happy friday everybody, I hope you did not get eaten alive by rampant shoppers in search of an illusive bargin.
[1] It reminds me of the old Billy Connolly comedy sketch about teaching your kid to read a watch…
“Son, the watch has three hands,
The first hand is the hour hand.
The second hand is the minute hand.
The third hand is the second hand.But dad you said the third hand is the second hand?”
It’s his 81st birthday today, I remember him joking about his 60th birthday and his daughter saying that the next year he would be on four boxes of candles for the cake.
Well Sir Billy I guess you now have to work through the fifth box of candles B-)
emily’s post • November 25, 2023 12:00 AM
A Sandringham or Bowler hat, even with a steel brim, not being acceptable evening attire in the casino, Bond had developed the same capability with a properly spin-thrown after-dinner thin mint chocolate.
..
Sam • November 25, 2023 3:58 AM
If anyone else outside the US is getting an “Access Denied” Shopify firewall page, it’s viewable through the Wayback Machine
Matthias U • November 25, 2023 7:40 AM
They only confiscate knives with blades over a certain length
Where have you been the last quarter century?
Last time I flew, they took my mini-swiss-knife with its 4cm blade. Sigh.
Jel .ə • November 25, 2023 8:37 AM
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a “fast” food kitchen. – Master Chef 117
Anselm Lingnau • November 25, 2023 1:00 PM
Actually, typical Swiss army knives should now be OK on international commercial flights because their blades are shorter than the maximum allowable length of six centimetres. (I still put mine into the checked suitcase, though.)
There’s probably lobbying involved by Victorinox (the company which makes the knives). Also, counter-lobbying by the operators of airport duty-free shops where you would otherwise buy a new Swiss army knife after your original one was confiscated at the security check.
Canis familiaris • November 26, 2023 10:05 AM
It’s not just blade length, but also tools. You are not allowed to have (certain) tools on your person or in hand-luggage in the cabin.
‘https://www.gov.uk/hand-luggage-restrictions/work-tools
Note that screwdrivers of whatever size are not allowed, and that will include the screwdriver on a ‘pen-knife’ with multiple tools, or a multi-tool. Also banned are pliers of any size, and saws of any size.
People with a professional background in unarmed combat are likely to know of many ways in which seemingly innocuous objects (which are allowed in the passenger cabin) can be repurposed as lethal weapons. Obviously, I’m not going to go into any of this here, but the baggage rules are reasonably inconvenient and hinder troublesome non-experts.
Experts, on the other hand, are not so easily stopped.
But the increased robustness of the door between the passenger cabin and flight-deck, together with strict rules of behaviour around opening and closing it as well as the hand-baggage screening have made it more difficult to make airliners into guided missiles.
The (necessary) processes around improving the security of air-travel all add up into making the experience a chore, so I avoid it as much as possible these days. Watching old TV programmes where people wandered up to the departure gate from ‘the street’ without any security checks, with paper tickets no less, seems utterly alien these days. Naïve, simpler times.
Anonymous • November 26, 2023 2:08 PM
@ Canis familiaris,
But the increased robustness of the door between the passenger cabin and flight-deck, together with strict rules of behaviour around opening and closing it as well as the hand-baggage screening have made it more difficult to make airliners into guided missiles.
I have my doubts about that. The hand-baggage screening does not seem to be effective at all; for example, last I heard, the TSA has less than a 50% chance of detecting a gun, let alone all the less dangerous stuff they like to confiscate. I recall Bruce talking favorably about the hardened cockpit doors, and I used to agree; but based on United Airlines Flight 93 and Germanwings Flight 9525, I’ve changed my mind. In the Germanwings case, 144 people died because of the hardened door. Whereas, on Flight 93, it was the weak door that allowed passengers to stop that “missile” from being “guided”—less than 90 minutes after the first crash, the passengers solved that problem with no direction or help from anyone else, and I expect people will make the same efforts at any future hijacking attempt. So, at best, the door’s preventing passengers from causing potentially-fatal commotion in the cockpit, and off the top of my head I can’t recall a case where it even did that.
Canis familiaris • November 26, 2023 4:52 PM
@Anonymous
Two questions:
1) Given that a properly secured flight-deck door would have prevented UA Flight 93 from being hijacked in the first case, how does having the door insufficiently secure thus generating the deaths of all on board improve matters?
2) What was the relative incidence of hijacks compared to crashes caused by suicidal pilots* before September 11th 2001?
*Note, it takes very little for a pilot to put an aircraft in an unrecoverable state. One of many odd things about Germanwings Flight 9525 was that the pilot didn’t do that.
Viola G. • November 26, 2023 6:56 PM
That was my anonymous message above. I thought I’d typed a name.
1) Given that a properly secured flight-deck door would have prevented UA Flight 93 from being hijacked in the first case, how does having the door insufficiently secure thus generating the deaths of all on board improve matters?
Attitudes toward hijacking were quite different back then, so it’s not so clear whether a hardened door in and of itself would’ve prevented such a hijacking. What if the bad guys on 93 said they were gonna kill someone every minute till the door was opened? The pilots might’ve complied; usually the hijackers would make some demands, take the plane on a detour to a foreign country, and eventually let everyone off safely. Or perhaps hijackers could’ve waited for a pilot to come out to use the toilet; staff weren’t as careful then as they are now.
Or maybe the hijackers would’ve become bona fide commercial pilots and crashed it that way, or maybe the door would’ve indeed prevented it. Who can say? My point is not that the hardened doors are bad per se; just that they’re not the unmitigated success people sometimes paint them as. There was an obvious and logical reason to harden them, and it seemed to be without downsides; but, in retrospect, there were trade-offs and I’m not sure they’ve been worth it. (Another downside: kids can no longer see the cockpit. That used to be a way to get them interested in flying, and some of them would go on to become pilots. It might be related to that ongoing pilot shortage that’s been in the news for the last several years; then again, the thought of having to with modern airport security every day should be quite sufficient to push people away from that career path.)
To question 2, I don’t have data but I’m guessing hijacks were much more common than murder-suicides by pilots. The Germanwings case was they first I’d heard of such a thing, anyway. And it’s largely mitigated by having another staff member enter the cockpit while someone’s out.
Another reaction that seemed like a “no-brainer” was requiring a passenger’s checked luggage to be removed if that passenger doesn’t board. But, again, it’s not obvious how that trade-off went. Everyone has to wait while people search the cargo hold, and it’s never a bomb, but maybe it’s never a bomb because the would-be bombers know about that countermeasure and never try.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Uthor • November 24, 2023 3:25 PM
I’D confiscate it. Yum!