Originally Posted by Loren Pechtel
Nitroglycerin is nitrate-based. It's going to be picked up by the ETD gadget.
It's also rather unstable, you could no doubt set it off by hitting it with something.
I agree it would be picked up by the ETD ... IF the container carrying it gets swabbed. But that is the whole point. How much is it going to slow things down if they have to swab every liquid container? For a leisure trip, I would typically have a carry-on that would haveat least:
1) 8 or 12 oz bottle of contact lens solution;
2) Bottle of dandruff shampoo (hotels don't provide);
3) At least one bottle of water;
4) bottle of sunscreen if we are heading to warm weather vacation;
5) possibly bottle of sport drink or soda.
No sunscreen or sport drink probably if on a business trip, but swabbing 3 or 4 bottles per passenger is going to take some time.
On the stability issue, the papers I have read on nitroglycerin state that it needs a pretty big "start" to explode. The example they give is that if you have a small pool of nitroglycerin on a surface, and you hit it with a hammer, the nitro under the hammer will explode, but in all likelihood, the rest of the nitroglycerin in the continguous pool will not explode.