General

What are the rules for air travel right now?

Advice on flying over the next few days: get to the airport early and courier your bags to your destination

After Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab set himself on fire on a Detroit-bound plane, no one really knows what the rules for airlines are, though CBS’s Peter Greenberg notes one universal rule: “get to your airport early.” Transport Canada ordered a ban on most carry-on luggage for flights to the United States (a ban that had already been announced by some of the individual airlines), with only a few seemingly-harmless items allowed on the planes. WestJet airlines told the National Post that these restrictions would last until Wednesday. But even as your backpacks and other sacks are being banned from airplanes, your
flight might leave a little sooner than it did yesterday; some of the harsher travel restrictions have been quietly lifted, like the rule that you can’t leave your seat in the last hour of the flight. However, pilots are still banned from telling the passengers which U.S. cities or landmarks they’re flying over. Greenberg thinks all of this is essentially useless, “an attempt to make people who didn’t fly very often feel better.” But he adds that people who do fly often do in fact know better. His advice for getting through these rules with a minimum of inconvenience: arrive at the airport two or three hours early, and “courier your bags ahead of time.”

National Post

CBS

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