How NOT to fly with boules

For a long time we’ve warned players not to put their boules in their carry-on luggage when they fly. In the United States, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers consider boules to be dangerous objects (like hammers) and will not allow them to be carried onto a plane in carry-on luggage.


And that’s pretty much the same around the world, even in France. Here’s an airport poster seen in Marseilles.

The other issue is that, to a TSA officer who has never heard of petanque, a boule looks remarkably like the stereotypical image of an anarchist bomb.

This was made vividly clear today (October 13, 2017) when a 63-year-old petanque player from Jersy (in the UK) attempted to fly to a competition in Denmark with his boules bag. The main contents of the bag were his team uniform and his set of personalized boules. But the bag also contained a phone changer and its cord, some kind of white electronic device (a voltage converter for the cell-phone charger?), and something that older and arthritic players will recognize— three containers of Biofreeze.

The Jersey TSA officers thought that the assemblage looked like a collection of bomb-making parts. They seized the bag. Since the player was an experienced veteran, I think that the bag must have been in his checked (not carry-on) luggage, but the bag was seized anyway. The player had to fly on to the competition without his bag. He played in a borrowed uniform, with borrowed boules, but reports that he didn’t play up to his usual level. His bag finally caught up with him, but too late for it to make a difference.

Apparently most players at the competition found the story amusing, but there is a serious lesson here. Airline security personnel are justifiably paranoid about containers that contain any kind of liquid. Electrical timers and wires are stereotypical parts of a bomb. (“Should I cut the red wire or the blue?!”) Security officers must process a lot of bags quickly— they don’t have time to stop and carefully analyze something that on quick inspection looks like it might be a bomb or a collection of bomb components. So they just act.

The moral of the story is: when flying to a competition—

• Put your boules in your checked (not carry-on) luggage.
• In your boule bag, don’t put anything that contains liquid, looks even vaguely “electronic”, or has wires.
• I have heard of players putting notes into their boule bags, explaining what the boules are and containing printouts of screenshots from petanque-related web sites. I don’t know how effective this is, but it certainly can’t hurt.

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