Air Travel with Brick Batteries

I posted this on REDUSER Forum recently, and since I am collecting my stories in one place I am going to repost it here. For all the times you get frustrated at TSA when travelling with gear in the USA, here is a story where everyone was really professional. The topic was travelling with large Lithium Ion Batteries, the TSA has rules about size and carrying them in the cabin, not checking them in. TSA Battery Page The thread digressed into TSA and their sometimes inconsistent application of "rules". After a while of travelling you realize some TSA agents are either poorly trained or didn't pay attention in training. I will embed the Nicky Hayden Interview so you can see it. We flew in & out of Nashville but the shoot was in Southern Kentucky near Nicky's home.

I was in Nashville in 2010 to shoot an interview with Nicky Hayden for Oakley. When leaving, I went through the screening and one of the RED V-Bricks kept getting flagged as having explosive traces. I guess they have sniffers in the x-ray machine because they got the alert right out of the machine. They swabbed the equipment, narrowed it down to one of my 2 batteries. They re-ran the x-ray again and then the TSA agent said he was going to call the BDE. I asked what that meant, and he said Bomb Disposal Expert! This tall, fit gentleman in a nice suit came over. His manner was one of trained military. He looked at the battery and had TSA x-ray it one more time while he watched. He asked me if I had been around explosives lately and I said no, but the gear belonged to Oakley and several people use it and sometimes there are pyrotechnics involved in shoots. He wanted to know if I knew this battery had been used in that scenario, I said I did not for a fact. He said he knew it was a battery and it had just been exposed to explosives on the outside, so he took my ID and boarding pass photographed them with his phone and let me go to the plane. He was very polite and very smart. That all took about an hour. 

I have been through that airport a few times since and consider it one of the most professional TSA crews, no one was ever freaking out.

When I get back to the Oakley video office I am telling the story and one of the team there says, "Oh yeah they were doing a back country snow board shoot and they split the gear up between several people and one of guys was the one who uses explosives to blast avalanches". I look at him and asked him why he didn't say anything earlier? He just forgot about it till I mentioned it. The next shoot he went on, he took the camera body from that shoot he forgot to tell me about, and he spent about 90 minutes with the TSA. Same traces of explosives. He said that wasn't as bad as what they did to the guy behind him who started touching his belongings to push them through the x-ray machine, because he was impatient. They hauled that guy away to another room. DO NOT ever touch another passengers stuff because if it comes up for review they are wondering why you were messing with other peoples belongings.

 - Brian Ferguson