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Fed up of flying with only 100ml liquids? Good news as European airports bring in high-tech scanners

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New 3D scanners could spell the end of frustrating liquid limits at airports. Here’s how they’ll keep flying safe.

Mini shampoo bottles have long been a staple of the European holiday. But that could change as airports begin to ease security measures later this year.

High-tech CT scanners will eliminate the need for the 100 ml liquid rule at major hubs, promising to streamline security checks and slash queue times.

But why was the 100 ml rule implemented in the first place – and will removing it make flying less safe? Here’s everything travellers need to know.

Why is the 100 ml liquid rule in place at airports?

Since 2006, airline passengers around the world have been limited to carrying liquids no larger than 100 ml in their hand luggage.

The rule was introduced after British police uncovered a terrorist plot to detonate liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks on a series of transatlantic flights.

The conspirators intended to assemble and detonate a device mid-flight, with hydrogen peroxide and other substances injected into 500 ml soda bottles, leaving the caps sealed. If mixed to a specific strength with other ingredients, the common bleach product can become explosive.

If the plot had been successful, it is believed it would have been far more deadly than the 9/11 attacks. It would have targeted multiple flights heading from the UK to at least five US and two Canadian airports.

Immediately after the discovery, hand luggage was completely banned on planes as a precautionary measure. This was later relaxed after tests were carried out to determine what amount of liquid was safe to carry, and a 100 ml container limit was introduced.

Experts found that mixing the smaller containers into a larger one to create a highly damaging explosive device on board was not realistic. They determined this would either fail or prematurely detonate, injuring the perpetrator but doing little to no damage to the aircraft.

Passengers are now limited to taking a maximum of one litre of liquids through security in containers no larger than 100 ml each. These must be separated into a clear resealable bag and removed from hand luggage when passing through the security scanners.

Why is the 100 ml liquid rule ending?

After 18 years, the 100 ml liquid rule will soon be ditched in some countries thanks to advanced new security scanners.

Using Computed Tomography (CT) X-ray technology, similar to that used in the medical field, they provide a clear 3D image of what’s inside passengers’ bags.

The images can be rotated 360 degrees and zoomed in on, allowing thorough analysis that’s likened to ‘digitally unpacking the bag’, device manufacturer Smiths Detection explains. This is an improvement on the current 2D imaging used at most airports.

The scanners also deploy sophisticated threat detection algorithms that can detect explosives – including liquids – and other hazards, according to the UK’s Department for Transport.

Existing 2D scanners can discriminate between organic and inorganic materials, displaying items in different colours, but CT scanners take this a step further.

With the help of AI technology, they can differentiate liquids – such as water, hydrogen peroxide, or high-strength alcohol – and offer a more complete view of electronics, according to equipment manufacturer Sens-Tech.

“The newest screening technology that is being deployed can detect explosive compounds in larger quantities,” a US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokesperson further explains.

If an item appears suspect, the bag will face further screening by security officers, who will inspect it for prohibited items.

Will removing the 100 ml liquid rule make flying less safe?

Removing the 100 ml liquid rule will not make flying less safe. On the contrary, the new scanners will improve security, according to the UK’s Department for Transport.

This is because they provide more detailed images of what people are carrying, allowing them to detect potential threats and prohibited items with greater ease.

It will also streamline the airport experience, cutting security check times and making travel more convenient for passengers.

An added benefit is the reduction of plastic waste, as passengers abandon using dozens of disposable toiletry bottles in favour of larger containers.

The new tech could also save passengers money, as they will be allowed to bring in water and other drinks from outside, rather than relying on expensive airport shops.

When will the 100 ml liquid rule be removed in Europe?

Some European airports have already scrapped the 100 ml liquid rule. The new scanners are already in use at Teesside International Airport in County Durham, UK; Schiphol in Amsterdam; and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome.

Various UK airports, including London Gatwick and Heathrow, have trialled the scanners in recent years. The UK government has set a June 2024 deadline to roll out the new security technology, though some airports have said early 2025 is more realistic.

Once the machines have been installed, the 100 ml rule will be phased out over the following two years. Until then, passengers may not experience the time-saving benefit of the new tech. But ultimately, the simplified system could help airports process 30 per cent more passengers per hour, according to Sens-Tech.

In future, UK passengers will be permitted to carry up to two litres of liquids in their hand luggage with no restrictions on container size. They will not be required to place liquids in a plastic bag or separate them from their luggage when passing through security.

Do airports outside of Europe have CT scanners?

Even when the new measures are in place, passengers are advised to check the rules for countries they are transiting through or travelling back from, as many destinations are yet to implement this new technology.

If 3D scanners are not installed in the airport you are returning from, you could be forced to throw away liquids over 100 ml in your hand luggage.

Only a handful of European airports have plans to install 3D scanners. Elsewhere, some US airports like Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, Chicago O’Hare and New York’s LaGuardia have started using the new tech.

However, TSA says it will take many years to deploy the technology across the entire system in the US, meaning the 100 ml rule (known there as 3-1-1) will remain in place to ensure transportation is secure.

Qatar’s Hamad International Airport in Doha has also stepped up its security with the new scanners.

How do 3D airport scanners impact electrical items?

Tablets and laptops must currently be removed from cabin baggage before passing through the security scanners at most airports.

CT scanners will eliminate the need for this, as they allow electrical items to be studied in detail while still inside a bag.

Film camera enthusiasts have noted that increased radiation emitted by the new scanners could damage analogue film, leading to fogging and colour degradation. Some Reddit users say they ask for their film to be examined by hand, though this is at the discretion of airport staff.

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  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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A 4-year cruise or a €1 house in Italy: Inside the schemes helping Americans skip Trump’s presidency

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Searches by Americans for moving abroad soared in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.

Following the recent US election result, Google searches for ‘how to move to Europe’ increased by more than 1,000 per cent in some countries.

Searches by Americans for moving to Canada and Australia soared by 1,270 and 820 per cent respectively in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.

The interest in leaving the States has not gone unnoticed by marketing firms.

A residential cruise ship is now offering Americans a four-year ‘escape’ trip while a Sardinian village has relaunched its €1 house scheme.

Cruise company offers four-year escape from Trump

Cruise firm Villa Vie Residences is marketing a four-year round the world trip to Americans looking to skip Donald Trump’s second term as president.

The Tour La Vie programme offers passengers a stay of up to four years onboard while visiting 140 countries – which doesn’t include the US.

The irreverently named packages include a one-year ‘Escape from Reality’ cruise, a two-year ‘Mid-Term Selection’ option, a three-year ‘Everywhere but Home’ cruise, and the four-year ‘Skip Forward’ trip.

Guests would join the Villa Vie Odyssey, a residential cruise ship which set sail from Belfast in September, several months into its voyage.

“We came up with this marketing campaign before we even knew who would win. Regardless of who would have won, you would have half of the population upset,” CEO Mikael Petterson told US news site Newsweek.

“Quite frankly, we don’t have a political view one way or the other. We just wanted to give people who feel threatened to have a way to get out.”

Prices start at a little under $40,000 (€38,000) a year. For those opting for the full four-year escape, single-occupancy cabins start at $256,000 (€243,000) while double-occupancy costs up to $320,000 (€303,000).

The price includes all food and drinks (alcohol only at dinner), WiFi, medical visits, weekly housekeeping service and bi-weekly laundry.

Sardinian village relaunches €1 house scheme for Americans

In rural Sardinia, the village of Ollolai has revived its €1 house scheme, now targeting Americans exhausted by the election.

The homes-for-the-price-of-an-espresso offer has been relaunched for US citizens “worned [sic] out by global politics” and “looking to embrace a more balanced lifestyle”, local authorities write on the village’s website.

“Of course, we can’t specifically mention the name of one US president who just got elected, but we all know that he’s the one from whom many Americans want to get away from now and leave the country,” village mayor Francesco Columbo told US news site CNN.

“We have specifically created this website now to meet US post-elections relocation needs.”

Those needs include slowing down and recharging with Ollolai’s dreamy Mediterranean lifestyle.

“Nestled in pristine nature, surrounded by incredible cuisine, and immersed in a community with ancient traditions in the rare Earth’s Blue Zone, Ollolai is the perfect destination to reconnect, recharge and embrace a new way of life,” the website claims.

Available properties will soon be listed online with prices ranging from €1 for houses needing substantial renovations to €100,000 for those that are ready to live in.

This is not the first time the village in Sardinia has put houses for a pittance on the market. In a bid to halt a steep population decline, Ollolai began selling off abandoned homes in 2018 to people willing to carry out $25,000 (€24,000) of renovations within a three-year timespan.

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  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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Catalonia’s holiday rental ban may not be allowed under EU law as Airbnb pushes back

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Catalonia has said they want to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 holiday lets in the next 5 years.

Catalonia’s recent ban on Airbnb-style holiday rentals breaches EU law, according to a complaint filed with the European Commission by an industry group.

The European Holiday Home Association claims that the ban, introduced by Catalonia in June this year, breaches the provision of services directive.

The Spanish region announced that they wanted to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 tourist flat licences over the next five years. The city has not granted new licences since 2014 but this has not helped to stem a housing crisis, with locals saying they can not find places to live at affordable prices.

Why has Barcelona’s Airbnb ban been challenged?

“We are convinced that EU law has not been respected,” Viktorija Molnar, Secretary General of the European Holiday Home Association (EHHA), said in a statement released on Wednesday.

“By submitting the EU complaint, we hope that the European Commission will take a step further and open a formal infringement procedure against Spain,” added Molnar, whose group represents short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Expedia’s Vrbo.

The move follows legal concerns raised by the European Commission itself that restrictions brought in by the Spanish region were disproportionate to the aim of tackling housing shortages.

EHHA argues that “unjustified, disproportionate and unsuitable” restrictions breach the EU’s Services Directive, which regulates a swathe of activities from hotels to legal advice. They also said that claims about the impact of Airbnb on housing affordability are “politically inflamed”.

The lobby group may have support from the European Commission itself, whose officials wrote to Spanish authorities to protest the law in February according to a document seen by Euronews Travel.

“The Commission services consider that the restrictions laid down in [Catalonia’s] Decree-law 3/2023 are not suitable to attain the objective of fighting housing shortage and are disproportionate to that objective,” the document said.

Spanish authorities could have also considered less swingeing restrictions and hadn’t offered evidence that short-term rentals were responsible for housing market tensions, it added – noting that there were three times as many empty dwellings as tourist rental properties in Catalonia.

Barcelona is just one European holiday destinations trying to find ways to tackle overtourism.

Cities like Venice have banned cruise ships from stopping on their shores, Athens regularly restricts visitor numbers at the famous Acropolis and Amsterdam is moving its red light district out of the city centre to try and clean up its image.

How the European Commission is taking on holiday rentals

Brussels has already taken action to bring the sharing economy within the regulatory fold, offering new rights to platform workers and hiking value-added tax on short-term lets and ridesharing apps such as Uber.

But the issue could prove totemic for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – who has created the first-ever European Commissioner for Housing as part of her second mandate, set to take office within weeks.

She has told Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen to “tackle systemic issues with short-term accommodation rentals”, in a mission letter that handed him the housing brief alongside responsibility for energy policy.

A spokesperson for the Catalan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CORRECTION(20 November, 10:02): corrects spelling of Molnar’s name

Author

  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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Microsoft pitches AI agents that can perform tasks on their own at annual Ignite event

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The move has been criticised by other tech companies who have branded Microsoft as being a “panic mode”.

In opening remarks to a company conference in the United States on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has set the stage for where the company is taking its artificial intelligence (AI) business.

AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people’s behalf.

But the cost of building and running AI tools is so high that more investors are questioning whether the technology’s promise is overblown.

Microsoft said last month that it’s preparing for a world where “every organisation will have a constellation of agents – ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous”.

Microsoft elaborated in a blog post Tuesday that such autonomous agents “can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors”.

Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference caters to its big business customers.

Microsoft criticised

The pivot toward so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users are seeing limits to the large language models behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s own Copilot.

Those systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are good at certain writing-based work tasks.

But tech companies have been working to build AI tools that are better at longer-range planning and reasoning so they can access the web or control computers and perform tasks on their own on a user’s behalf.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce also has its “Agentforce” service that uses AI in sales, marketing, and other tasks.

“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He went on to claim that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a flop” that is inaccurate and spills corporate data.

Author

  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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