Carry-On Alcohol on Planes

[Maxprime]

Save your judgements - I'm curious of the legality of this. I saw nothing on the airlines' websites - and checked the exhaustive list for TSA. The only hit I got was that alcohol could be considered a flammable fuel - weak. Can you bring alcohol on planes? It doesn't seem right.

[ahow]

I always just put it in a Nalgene bottle and have never had a problem. Also, I had a bottle of tequila in my suitcase carry-on and nobody said anything. They won't let you take matches, lighters, etc on the plane so I don't see why alcohol would be danger since you can't light it. And if the plane is on fire, you have bigger problems than booze...

[Phil]

If you don't drink it then you are transporting it across state lines. Is that legal?

[Maxprime]

Originally Posted by Phil

If you don't drink it then you are transporting it across state lines. Is that legal?

That won't be a problem.

Plus, as compared to normal bars, they can't throw us off until we get where we are going - provided we're on good behavior until 10,000 feet.

[Salzmann]

My husband and I do it all the time. We fly transatlantic in Coach and you gotta have some way to cope.

The law is that you are not allowed to have any alcohol not served by the flight attendant. It can be enforced, particularly if you appear drunk and/or are conspicuously serving yourself from a stash of your own mini-bottles. Of course, if you ask for tonic and ice and add some liquid from your Dasani bottle, who's to know? I have also brought on wine in a water bottle- might be less conspicuous if you put it in a Welch's Grape Juice bottle.

A couple of weeks after 9/11, I flew from Nantucket to Newark and they apologetically confiscated a mini-bottle of wine that I had in my carry-on (I didn't have any checked bags). They were SO paranoid back then. A week later my husband and I flew to Scotland and picked up duty-free gin at the shop in Newark Airport. They delivered it to us on the plane. Totally illogical, but that's the way it's been since 9/11. That's still the practice with duty-free purchases although some airlines have made in-flight announcements saying you are prohibited from breaking out the duty-free stuff in flight.

[Dr T Non-Fan]

Wine is OK, but 151-Rum probably is not. To me, it's a gray area in between those alcohol levels.

[llcooljabe]

Originally Posted by Salzmann

A week later my husband and I flew to Scotland and picked up duty-free gin at the shop in Newark Airport. They delivered it to us on the plane. Totally illogical, but that's the way it's been since 9/11. That's still the practice with duty-free purchases although some airlines have made in-flight announcements saying you are prohibited from
breaking out the duty-free stuff in flight.

I thought they did that because you can't buy duty free stuff unless you're flying internationally? So instead of preventing non ticketed passengers (e.g. domestic passengers) from entering and browsing, they simply deliver to the plane.

[Salzmann]

Originally Posted by llcooljabe

I thought they did that because you can't buy duty free stuff unless you're flying internationally? So instead of preventing non ticketed passengers (e.g. domestic passengers) from entering and browsing, they simply deliver to the plane.

Yes, that's true- it's duty-free only because you're taking the goods out of the country and they want to make sure you do. But I still find it a contradiction that some of these liquids are flammable but you can take them on board. (They could be delivered at the end of the flight, for example.)

[Maxprime]

Before we walked out the door, I grabbed my iPod and books - my roomate grabbed a bottle of crown and a bottle of rum and said, "This is my in-flight entertainment". Haha

[Kaia]

I dunno about bringing it on, but one airline I was on told a guy he couldn't take the little bottles you can buy from them off the flight. He had to finish them there. Thought that was kind of strange.