The UK’s supposedly-foiled liq­uid bomb plot is obvi­ously the big item in the news today. It sounds pretty cred­i­ble. Of course, I’m more inter­ested in the reprecussions.

The US has responded by tem­porar­ily ban­ning the car­riage of liq­uids on air­planes, includ­ing water and sham­poo. That is pretty annoy­ing for peo­ple like me who like to travel with only carry-on lug­gage, but until the threat passes it is not a big deal to place my sham­poo, lotions, and my other fine skin-care prod­ucts in checked bag­gage. Fur­ther­more, even the domes­tic air­lines still offer drink­ing water free of charge, so I don’t mind check­ing the water bot­tle too.

How­ever, the BAA ban on all carry-on bag­gage on flights depart­ing Heathrow Air­port is sim­ply inex­cus­able. My usual air­line, Vir­gin Atlantic, requires you to pur­chase insur­ance for any checked lug­gage worth more than $500, but their lim­i­ta­tion of lia­bil­ity is only $2500. So putting my cam­eras in checked bag­gage is not an option. Also, lap­top com­put­ers in checked bag­gage are exempt from lia­bil­ity, even if the air­line loses them, so you’d have to be pretty dumb to check one of those too. If I were sup­posed to fly out of Heathrow today, I think I’d just ask for my money back instead.

Return­ing for a moment to the tem­po­rary nature of the Amer­i­can ban on liq­uids and gels in flight: the TSA claims that they’re going to sort out a way to detect pos­si­ble bomb com­po­nents so that the ban can be ended. The prob­lem is pretty much intractable. I wish them luck.