As air travel picks up in Pittsburgh, TSA reminds travelers: ‘Know what’s in your bag’

As air journey picks up once more, Transportation Security Administration officials at Pittsburgh International Airport are reminding vacationers to double examine their carry-on luggage for some of the more innocuous goods that can lead to headaches at security checkpoints.

Throughout the state, TSA officers are screening in between 2 and 2.3 million travellers daily — however reduce than the around 2.5 million daily in the pre-pandemic summer of 2019. At Pittsburgh International, passenger volume is about 72{6932ee47e64f4ce8eedbbd5224581f6531cba18a35225771c06e4f1b3f0d9667} what it was pre-pandemic, officers claimed.

“Know what you can provide,” claimed Karen Keys-Turner, the TSA’s federal safety director for Pittsburgh Worldwide. “Know what’s in your bag.”

That goes for prohibited weapons these as guns, knives and brass knuckles to water bottles and total-sized shampoo and lotion.

Any liquids — everything that can spilled, unfold or pumped — has to be a lot less than 4.3 ounces. All bottles have to be in a obvious, quart-sized bag.

That also contains food stuff. Among the the hundreds of water and soda bottles that Pittsburgh TSA officials put out on display Monday – collected from checkpoints in about 3 times — were jars of salsa, honey and a container of crab salad.

“In every single line, somebody’s received one thing,” Keys-Turner mentioned.

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TSA officers famous that when there are much much less business enterprise tourists as air vacation picks up, the variety of vacationers has grown.

“Travelers who are headed out on vacation normally are not as common with stability checkpoint protocols, specifically when it arrives to knowing what is permitted to be carried by means of a stability checkpoint,” Keys-Turner mentioned.

In Pittsburgh, domestic air travel far more than doubled in the 1st two months of 2022 when compared to the initially two months of 2021 — 950,042 in comparison to 448,709.

Air vacation plummeted in early 2020 as the covid-19 pandemic swept across the environment, and two years later on it is even now has not entirely recovered. In spite of the decline in passengers, TSA officers have been catching far more guns for each man or woman in Pittsburgh and throughout the region.

In 2021, officers stopped 21 vacationers with guns at the airport — the very same variety of firearms stopped in 2017 even with a pandemic-driven decrease in air vacation. The Allegheny County Airport Authority mentioned about 2.5 million much less tourists passed by way of the airport in 2021 as opposed to 2017.