MY new motto is "fly dry." Pack all liquids and gels in checked bags.
I suggest you do the same, especially when flying abroad. You'll avoid the stress of sorting out new rules that seem to shift by the second and can force you to surrender makeup, food, liquor and more at airports.
The restrictions were widely adopted in August after Britain said it had thwarted a plot that involved using liquid explosives to blow up airliners. Since then, the rules have been revised several times, and their enforcement -- even in the U.S. -- isn't always uniform.
A bigger headache is that each country has its own practices. When flying from the U.S. to any nation, you may face one set of rules leaving the U.S. and another set coming back.
Eva Scalzo discovered this firsthand. I encountered the Newport Beach mother at LAX's Bradley International Terminal the day before Thanksgiving.
On her way from the U.S. to Mexico, she said, authorities allowed her to take bottles and baby formula for her 1-year-old daughter onto her Alaska Airlines flight. But when she returned through the Puerto Vallarta airport, "they made us dump everything," she said, except one bottle of formula.
When I asked agents at the Mexicana Airlines ticket counters at LAX whether Mexico restricted liquids in carry-ons, the first one said, "We're not so strict" as the U.S., and the second said she didn't know. (When inquiring, I didn't identify myself as a reporter because I wanted to see how hard or easy it was for an ordinary traveler to get this information.) A call to the airline's reservation number brought this response: "We do not transport any liquids in carry-ons" on any flight, except for baby formula and prescription medicines.
Even trained researchers can be flummoxed.
Chino Trinidad, a news reporter from the city of Mandaluyong in the Philippines, said he downloaded what he thought were universal rules for carry-on liquids before leaving Nov. 10 on a flight to L.A. from Manila.
But his zippered plastic bag, carefully packed with a tiny bottle of eyedrops and the smallest tube of toothpaste he could find, was confiscated, he said.
An airline employee at the LAX ticket counter confirmed the Philippines' ban on carry-on liquids, as did Franco Leonor, an IT consultant from Los Angeles. On a recent flight from Australia to Los Angeles by way of the Philippines, he said, his carry-on hairspray and cologne passed muster in Melbourne, Australia, but not in Manila.
