Years ago, pre-9/11, I had given some friends a ride to the airport and was walking with them to the gate. When I went through the security checkpoint, I dropped the contents of my pockets in the tray and walked through the metal detector. The metal detector went off, but nobody seemed to notice — they were all huddled around the tray containing my belongings. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that my keychain had a small knife attached. I had been through security many times with my small Swiss Army-style knife no problem, but when I was actually flying, I never bothered taking my car keys, which had this:
They asked me if I was boarding a flight and I told them no, that I was just walking my friends to the gate. They talked amongst themselves for a minute, then decided that I could leave the knife there at the checkpoint and collect it on my way out. Cool, no harm, no foul.
We were about halfway down the long walk to the gate at the far end of the terminal when it occurred to me that the metal detector had actually gone off when I walked through, but everybody had been so obsessed over the one-inch blade on my keychain that they missed it. I started patting myself down, then reached into my inside coat pocket. My friend turned to see why I had stopped and saw me frozen staring at the object in my hand: a sheath containing a set of three throwing knives, with blades a little over three inches long. His eyes got huge and he asked me to please put those away before he got pulled from his flight (okay, maybe “asked” isn’t entirely accurate — there was much colorful language included in his “request” and I’m pretty sure “please” wasn’t actually part of it). I had been practicing with the throwing knives a few days earlier, but had no recollection of putting them in my inside coat pocket — definitely not where I would normally have kept them.
On my way out, I considered asking security why my one-inch keychain blade was such a concern when they allowed the whole set of throwing knives…but ultimately decided that discretion would be a much wiser choice here.
In the end, I was happy that it all worked out in my favor, but I lost a lot of faith in airport security that day.
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