Re: [Leica] London and Paris Trip- Airport Security

[Byron Rakitzis <leica@rakitzis.com>]

>I am in London.  I have never been through Heathrow without them putting the
>film through the X-ray machine but I guess if you make enough fuss they may
>hand inspect it.

Simon,

This may be apocryphal but I heard that after Attenborough lost
a whole documentary worth of film at Manchester airport to one of
those high-powered luggage scanners, airport security in Britain is
now obliged to honor a request for hand-inspection of film. This is a
bit of a non-sequitur, as the carry-on scanners use much lower power,
but that's the story I heard.

I travelled through Heathrow last summer a number of times, and since
I was on a journey with many legs and I was carrying 400 speed film,
I decided to try to minimize the number of exposures this film got to
X-rays. I didn't make a big fuss at all, but the security guards tried
to get me to put my film through the machine using ridicule. Instead, I
politely insisted I have the film hand-inspected. This meant among other
things unwrapping from the foil every roll of unexposed 120 film I had,
but everyone was happy in the end.

Byron.