Originally Posted by
STBCypriot
For reasons unknown to me, my checked luggage is frequently manually searched by TSA (905 of the time). Yes, they leave the little note saying that they have searched my luggage manually. But I am getting a little of sick of this because the approach appears to be to dump out the entire contents of my luggage, rummage through the contents, and then shove everything back into my suitcases.
There appears to be no attempt to arrange the contents in a logical manner (I packed everything neatly and orderly) when returning my belongings back into my bags nor to even zip or buckle the internal zippers or straps to help hold the items in the luggage.
So I have two questions:
1. What can I do to avoid these manual searches? What could I possibly be carrying that is prompting these manual searches. Was it the jar of peanut butter, the brown sugar, the canned pumpkin (to make pies for Thanksgiving while I am overseas), my hairspray, my shampoo, the tonka toy truck that is a birthday gift for my friend's son, what?
2. Do I have a right to be present when they do these searches? I don't care so much about watching them do the search, I just want to repack my luggage properly, because it appears that TSA is either incapable of doing so or has no desire to do so (I suspect it is the latter). If I do have this right, how do I exercise it? And should I expect retaliation?
1) Peanut butter looks like plastic explosive on the x-ray machine and will cause a search to be initiated. You can tell the airlines that you want to be present while the bag is searched. That works - at some airports.
2)Depends on the airports if you can watch while they ravage your luggage. You can complain to TSA at the airport but be aware that TSA will attempt to put the blame for your trashed luggage off onto the airline's baggage handling equipment. That might be true depending, again, on which airport you fly out of . Are the contents of your luggage tightly packed against moving? There shouldn't be any retaliation as the baggage folks shouldn't have anything to do with the checkpoint screening operation.