"activation" and "device" ... not the words I would use... :-) But it depends on how you say it too... on if your tone of voice sounds convincing or not... How about: "That's the emergency safety release. It's for just in case if you forget to pull the ripcord, it opens the parachute for you before you can hit the ground." Now you've conjured up a comical image for the agent, something to divert his attention ever so slightly. Also, the powers that be in our society have done their best to program everyone to respond to the words "emergency" and "safety" with awe and reverence. The reason the TSA wants to inspect your shoes, confiscate your toothpaste, and tear your rig apart? It's for your safety... So, mixing the word "safety" in with your spiel may help you to harness a bit of the power of that programming... Instead of "reserve parachute," I'd use "backup parachute." Of course, it's more than what you say, it's also how you say it, and your demeanor and body language. In addition to specific things that the TSA agents are trained to look for, your friendly TSA agent is also relying on intuition to pick out anything about you that JDLR ("Just doesn't look right.") Basically it comes down to how much you stand out from the crowd. If you dress like everyone else, move like everyone else, have a demeanor and personality like everyone else, then you're not going to arouse suspicion. But if for example your style of dress doesn't match your personality, now you are a little bit different from most everyone else the TSA agent encounters during the day, and his intuition is going to press him to keep digging... Gender roles are of course a part of how the TSA agent is going to perceive you. It's probably much less common for the TSA agent to encounter various female personality types traveling with tool kits, mechanical contraptions such as skydiving rigs, etc, as it is for the TSA agent to encounter male personality types with such equipment. So right there, if you're female, now you're standing out from the crowd a bit more, and so this is going to put the TSA agent's intuition a little bit more on alert, regardless of if the agent is male or female. Of course, the more educated and progressively minded someone is, the more they can compensate for and over-ride any sexist or racist directions their intuition might be pushing them in... It's interesting that the majority of TSA agents seem to be male, because when it comes to intuition -- and intuition is the primary tool of their trade -- you would think that women would tend to do better than men? In the factory where I work, less than 10% of the workforce is female!!! This is a really really low percentage, even for the industry we are in. And I swear to God, in our industry, we are absolutely the dumbest company you will find. We're also the industry leader, and one of the most profitable, near the top of the fortune 500. But one thing is clear to me, we don't make money by being smart. The stories I could tell of waste and mismanagement and corruption... My experience at my job leads me observe that perhaps the gender ratio of the workforce might be a good indicator of the health of the culture of an operation. There are also the dynamics of the interaction between the personalities of the agent and the subject. Some people have personalities which are hostile towards not all females, but at least some female personality types as well as some male personality types. I don't have data at hand to support this assertion. It would be an interesting question to study... With a TSA agent / police officer / etc is a complete jerk, is he or she only a jerk towards certain personality types, and is there a gender bias in who he or she is a jerk towards? When I compare my experiences with law enforcement, customs, and border control agents in the various 1st world countries I've been in, namely the US, Canada, France, and Norway, the US consistently comes up short. Generally, the problem is that a good many of the US agents I encounter are too busy being hostile and aggressive to actually notice what's going on around them... Also, when all of the people being screened are more stressed and put more on edge by the overall presentation of the screening operation, what happens is that the people who are stressed because they have something to hide then have an easier time blending in with the crowd... My advice... if you're dealing with anyone who might give you trouble, is this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16873109031 That's a Sony Digital Voice Recorder. There is a cheaper model with similar specs that's only $35. This one is about $65. It runs on two AAA batteries. If you use rechargeable batteries, the run time, per the manual, is over 45 hours!!!! You won't find a recorder with longer run time than this. Before you leave for the airport, hit record, slide the lock-out to the "locked" so you don't press buttons on it by accident, pop it in your pocket, and forget about it. When you go through screening, put the contents of your pockets through the Xray in a plastic tub that's ahead of your rig, put the rig in last. By the time they're staring at your rig on the xray screen, you've already gone through the metal detector and you've got the voice recorder back in your pocket. Everything they say can... and will... be posted on youtube :-) A small discrete video camera is something I'm looking at getting as well, but in any case, if you do happen to have a video camera, or even just still pictures, the higher quality audio of a voice recorder can be edited in afterwards to make for a much more compelling video evidence of what went down. I'll be taking a parachute rig through Ohare airport in a few months... I let you know how it goes.
