petaluma1

Will this be on next week's "good catch" list?


TSA took somebody's large teddy bear.

Boggie Dog

The 12/14 article has gone missing.

Replaced with the Teddy Bear article hitting the news, byline 12/15.

TWA884

CNN Money:

WillCAD

I don't understand this at all.

Though the stuffed bear was quite large, it was smaller than a human being, and human beings are screened by the millions each day.

It appears to be too large to fit in the carry-on x-ray scanner. However, there are protocols for screening items which can't be x-rayed, such as photographic film.

The bear could easily - and quickly - have been screened by the same means used to screen human beings and medical assistive devices: WTMD combined with ETD swabbing, followed by vigorous hands-on groping.

But instead, the TSOs chose to take the lazy way out. "It's weird, so it's prohibited."

And Saddington Bear gets left by a trash can in an airport. Maybe Tom Hanks can make a movie about this one...

TWA884

According to its owner, YouTuber Jake Paul, the teddy bear is 9' tall.

Here is his video of the "incident":

TWA884

And a lot more details in this Daily Breeze article:

CDTraveler

They sell those bears at CostCo. The thing is actually bigger than it looks in the first picture. My son was fooling around with one in the store last week and from seeing it up close I can tell you it wouldn't fit in most cars in a passenger seat, so I doubt you could cram one into a plane seat.

Rather rotten of the YouTuber to just abandon it.

GUWonder

Is that store-sold stuffed animal bigger than the late "Andre the Giant"? He fit in airplane passenger seats. He cleared airport security screening checkpoints.

Here he is:

http://i479.photobucket.com/albums/r...anandrecq7.jpg

The giant teddy bear had a ticketed seat, according to some articles. Doesn't the "9 foot teddy" get shipped in boxes whose biggest dimension is smaller than 9 feet? Compressing a stuffed animal isn't all that hard to do, and in some ways it easier to do than to try to compress a newly cut Christmas tree if unfamiliar with the methods to make it simple.

Even when not compressed, this teddy bear would perhaps cause me less discomfort if it spilled over into my seat too than what has happened to me from some "people of size" spilling over into my seat space.

jkhuggins

Response from the TSA Blog:

http://blog.tsa.gov/2016/12/tsa-myth...-officers.html

GUWonder

Teddy bears can be dangerous, in that they can be used to conceal dangerous items -- something too many children in current and/or former conflict zones have realized. But the TSA can screen teddy bears -- even oversized ones -- in a way that ordinary children cannot.

zebranz

Sorry but don't believe you- I has seen many passengers bigger fit in seats! Usually a seat and a half....

He doesn't have any body odor, talk, ask to have you buy them a drink, bother the FA's, get up to go to the bathroom. I think he would a better seat mate than many others.

I hope they find him a good home. It would be a shame to be stuck at the airport for the rest of his life.

CDTraveler

1. Andre the Giant died in 1993. You might not have noticed, but unless the bear had a ticket in first class, the space available in which to cram the bear is noticeably less than the space of a 1993 flight.

2. the bear is 9 feet, Andre was only 7.

The bears arrive at CostCo in boxes about the size of a large refrigerator. Several have been crammed in each box and when the straps around the box are cut, they pop open with a fair bit of force. Actually compressing a stuffed animal and keeping it compressed requires equipment that wouldn't make it past the TSA, especially when you consider that the equipment would need to be larger than a checked bag, and no article I saw mentioned that the YouTuber had such equipment, but feel free to make up whatever you like.

You're claiming you've seen passengers more than 9 feet tall and 3 feet wide at the shoulder fit in airline seats? :roll eyes: Does the Guinness Book of Records know about them?

GUWonder

1. You might not have noticed, but I already noted that Andre the Giant was dead. The word "late" means something.

2. The seated teddy bear is not 9 feet tall. Perhaps the stretched out bear is 9 feet tall. The giant Costco teddy bear can be squeezed into a typical fully upright lawn chair.

I would find this teddy bear in my neighboring plane seat on a 3-3 seat or bigger plane to be less problematic for my flight than some of the "people of size" I've had next to me on wide-body flights. A "9 ft" giant teddy bear makes for a more easily compressible and better body pillow than a "person of size".

Without a machine, I'm pretty sure I could stuff this teddy bear into a container that is well less than 6 feet on each of its L/H/W dimensions.

TWA884

It's a moot point.

GUWonder

The airline has checked baggage dimension limits too. Is that Delta statement a moot point too?

IIRC, DL policies are published to limit oversized checked luggage, on flights within the US, to be no more than 80 linear inches in its dimensions.