Funny story about air travel with cpap unit

This is a truly factual narrative from first hand experience of mine of a couple of months ago.

I had air traveled with my cpap unit many times in the past, a few times thru a lot of international airports, with absolutely nothings unusual, except for the occasional delays. 'In fact some airports such as Hong Kong, I think, is totally unaware of anything special for cpap. You pull it out of your hand luggage, and they would say, You can keep all except your notebook computer in your carry on luggage'. They just want to scan the notebook separately.

So I started reading the very long list of items mentioned at the airport as items needing special treatment one way or other. Getting more confident with time, on the last outgoing flight, at a major US airport, I simply kept the cpap in the luggage, just taking my notebook out. Went thru the personal scans without a beep, when they asked me do you have a cpap. I said sure, I pulled it out, and they did the usual detailed dusting and scans. Then there was longer discussions among the security people. Finally one of them asked me what a small piece of wire sticking out of my cpap was!

If you search my posts here of about 2 yrs ago, you would come across a post my mine showing a mod for remote controlling my cpap with long wires. Usually I had a tiny connector fairly close to unit, but this time during packing the connector had fallen off, with the small dangling wires.

BTW, this was a newly opened terminal building, so most of the crew was relatively new. The mgr in charge was not sure about my explanation, so calls in some security guru. Meanwhile minutes of waiting has turned to about an hour!! The guys in and talks to me, he understands it. Proceed to take additional info about me from drivers licence and passport and whatever else and then let me go. My wife and I were lucky, because we were unusually early to arrive at the airport this time, so it looked like we would make the flight and not miss the wedding we were going to in Canada

As we were walking to gate, a long walk, towards the end, a few other people approach me, this time one in a business suit, I guess the senior mgr of security. He first strikes some friendly ice breaker lines, and then asks to see my passport. By now I recognized couple of the people with him were the ones checking me at security a few minutes ago. I said, but you had my passport for a whole half hour! The manager sheepishly says "Very sorry, but the lady forgot to write down your passport" !!! So at the end of this friendly chat, he amazed me by saying, "BTW, my sister uses cpap and she always complaints about the noise when taking off the mask and the difficulty of turning off the machine first. You have a real good idea, you should consider patenting it". Continuing to keep my cool throughout, knowing otherwise I would not get on that flight, I politely thanked him. We did make the flight.

Now I have shortened the tangling wire much smaller, and can push into one of the small outside cavities with masking tape over, so it does not ring alarm bells in the minds of security people. Our return flight was totally uneventful.

Cordially,
feeling_better

Probably not so funny at the time, eh? Glad you made it through and kept your sense of humor!

And just like magic....here it is!

viewtopic.php?p=312399#p312399
My DIY for remote OFF / ON for M-series Auto
pictures and description posted by feeling_better Nov 10, 2008

Hi rested gal, Nice to hear from you again! I posted a reply to one of your original concerns about this DIY in the other thread.