Rourke's Random Musings

A New York Times article published in October points out a major shift in the policy of frequent flyer programs; the inactivity timeout for many programs has been quietly shortened. If you don’t earn or spend miles for a certain period of time, airlines will close your account and take away all your miles. In times past, no airline would reclaim your miles until you’d gone at least three years without account activity. If you are a customer of several of the major US carriers, including US Airways, your miles will expire if you go 18 months without activity.

Want to really suffer on a domestic redeye? Pick the aisle seat. Don’t bring a blindfold. Get too little sleep the night before. Take Dramamine only to realize that sleep isn’t in the cards anyway.

Seriously, though. I’m on a flight from San Francisco to the Gartner show in Orlando and, out of habit, I chose the aisle seat on a plane that doesn’t have an adjustable headrest. In a window seat I would have been able to lean against the wall. If I’d managed to fall asleep there wouldn’t have been any need to get up during the flight. To make matters worse, this old plane has huge CRT screens in the aisle, and one of them is three feet in front of my face. I’d forgotten how bright those old sets could be with the cabin lights off. With a blindfold I might have been able to ignore it.

Read this Flyertalk post. The poster was arrested at a TSA checkpoint because a ball of rubber bands he was carrying looked suspicious and then came up as “flammable residue” when checked. He actually spent the night in jail and had to undergo a drug test in order to get released.

Note to self: be very nice to the TSA people. Very, very nice.

TSA officials in San Francisco seized a dangerous 3oz. tube of Coppertone Sport from the bag of traveler Rourke McNamara as he brazenly attempted to carry it onto an airplane. The sunblock was clearly visible in the in the mesh outside pocket of McNamara’s backpack. Had he properly placed the sunblock in a one quart sized zip-top bag there wouldn’t have been a problem, but without the safety-insuring plastic enclosure the Coppertone was just too dangerous to be allowed onto an aircraft.

If you’re flying with travel sized liquids, don’t forget your one quart, clear, zip-top bag. TSA isn’t kidding when they say all travel sized liquids must be in such a bag or they’ll be confiscated. Over the course of the last few weeks I’ve seen three people asked to throw away all their liquids and gels because they weren’t in a baggie. Thankfully these folks were all business travelers and managed to throw away the (new) toiletries without throwing a fit.

US airports are now allowing folks to fly with up to 3oz of any number of liquids. The catch is that you must remove the liquids from your carry-on luggage before going through security the liquids must be in a clear zip-log baggie and must go through the x-ray machine separately from the rest of your luggage.