So in the era of having airport security confiscate those ever dangerous nail clippers and shampoo bottles that are too big... how does the Olympic flame stay lit on a plane?
According to Wikipedia, the Olympic Flame is preserved in a back-up lantern overnight and for when it goes on airplanes.
So someone has convinced airline security forces that a lit lantern (or several of them - apparently there are always many backups to make sure the flame came from Greece) on a plane is OK. Just how many security personnel travel with this flame to make that safe?
According to the Vancouver Sun newspaper, the fuel tank portions of the torches - 675 of them that were used in Greece - are also coming back in the plane. It's good to hear that they will be fully emptied then recycled properly, but isn't that lots of incendiary material on a plane - fuel that isn't running the plane, so not in the tanks designed to carry fuel on a plane?
The engineering and security considerations around these torches must be truly significant.
OK everybody, enjoy that flame. It's taken a huge amount of human effort to get it here, and not just by the people running with it.
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