poisson

I have a travel belt (Wilderness Tactical frequent flyer) that I've been wearing for years. The belt itself is made of a nylon material and the buckle is entirely plastic. It has never set off a single metal detector in the US and I've never been required to remove it. However, outside of the US is a different story. Some airports require all travelers to remove belts. I've snuck through a few times without it beeping or anyone checking. But usually multiple people ask if I'm wearing a belt and expect me to lift my shirt to show. On a couple of instances, walk through metal detectors have beeped but stopped when I removed the belt.

Has anyone found a way to keep your belt on while passing through metal detectors? Maybe something like travel pants with a built in non-removable belt?

Any ideas why the metal detector would have gone off? Could it be the system somehow detecting the presence of a belt, even though it's non-metallic?

Davvidd

Don't tuck your shirt in. As for the alarm it actually depend on how the technician has tuned it. Same security service but different airports, the alarm could go on. It has happened to me many times and I found out that it is how sensitive they tune the walk thru.
I know that people would not believe this but I saw a very frustrated passenger eventually strip down to his boxers once.

Loren Pechtel

Why would I question this? They already require removing the thing I care about--shoes. I'd have no problem with stripping as far as the law allows to resolve a stupid metal detector hit. I don't care what they see but it makes them look bad--a win in my book.

We also have the case of the guy who went all the way in such a case. He won the court case in the end but that's just asking for it.

Davvidd

If only they would know what they are doing. I passed one CATSA screening without any issues and they seem to know what they are doing but then at YYZ it was the third degree. They wanted to see everything. It also depended on who the officer was who wanted to look inside. One lady at physical opening of the bag wanted to open everything she got. The other two were more relaxed about and did not do any hassling to the passengers.

WillCAD

Metal detectors only detect metal. If your belt indeed has no metal components, it would not alarm the WTMD. Are you certain that your belt is the Frequent Flyer model and not one of the others, i.e. the Instructor or Money belt? The Instructor belts have metal buckles, either steel or titanium, and the Money belt has metal zippers that absolutely will alarm the WTMD (it says so right on the Wilderness Tactical web site), and of course if you have even a single coin in the belt that would also alarm the WTMD.

Perhaps when the WTMD alarmed, it was for another reason. Maybe you had other metal on you, or maybe the alarm was manually tripped by the operator to force you into secondary inspection (possibly as a precaution if they operator saw that you were wearing a belt), or perhaps it was a random alarm (I've read that the machines can be programmed to randomly alarm every xxx people even if they have no metal, just for random secondaries).

Frankly, the belt is the least of my worries when I transit a c/p. I make sure I wear a pair of pants that stay up without the belt long enough to get through, and I take the belt off well in advance so I have less to fiddle with while taking my electronics out and putting everything in plastic bins. Last few flights, I actually took it off before I even queued up for the TDC; I always stop before entering the queue anyway to empty my pockets and secure everything in my carry-ons, so I just added belt removal to that ritual, rolling it up and putting it in an outside pocket of my carry-on.

For travel, you might also consider something like the , a no-metal, no-plastic piece of cloth and Velcro that pulls two belt loops tight together to hold up pants. They won't set off the WTMD, but they're thick enough to alarm the AIT, so keep that in mind if you fly in the US without TSA PreCheck.