It started with a normal exchange at a common check-in counter before a typical flight at Fort Lauderdale’s airport:
“I have an unloaded firearm in a locked case to declare,” I said.
The ticket agent matter-of-factly asked for identification and typed on her computer.
“To Chicago,” she said.
And so began a trip to five cities on five airlines using five one-way tickets. It ended three days and 4,274 miles later with the same padlocked case, containing the same unloaded handgun, sitting on a stopped luggage carousel at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. And sitting. With no one around. For anyone to take.
This is a story about flying around America legally with a Walther 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, the same kind of gun Esteban Santiago checked in a similarly locked case on a one-way flight into Fort Lauderdale in January, before he killed five people and wounded six in the airport after retrieving his gun upon landing.
I set out to see how Santiago got onto the plane. How easy was it for him to check a gun — with no other luggage — and fly across the country? And did the Fort Lauderdale shooting bring any change in how it’s done?
In taking the Second Amendment for a test flight, I found:
Two of the five airlines I flew returned the gun case to me by leaving it in the luggage area, untended and unnoticed — fully in line with the law. Airlines are free to follow starkly different policies on how they handle firearms.
No one questioned that I was flying on only one-way tickets with only a gun, just as no one questioned Esteban Santiago.
Although I was traveling with a concealed-carry permit, no one asked to see it.
Exactly how many people check guns on planes is a secret to the public. The Transportation Security Administration says it doesn’t track the number. Only the airlines know, and they won’t divulge it
In short, flying with guns is as much a part of travel as mileage points and middle seats. No one flinches if everything is in order. Anyone in your airport could be flying with a gun just as Santiago did.
This time, it was me.
Fort Lauderdale to Chicago, American Airlines
“May 10th already — where’s the time gone?” the ticket agent at American Airlines said as she wrote on a form for me to sign stating that the gun was unloaded and separated from the small box of ammunition in the locked case.
Each airline has a similar form. I had to place it inside my luggage, which I used on this first day of flying to carry the padlocked case containing the gun and box of ammunition.
The ticket agent took the luggage and, per American Airlines policy, set it on the conveyor belt behind the ticket desk where other bags went.
And that was that. Four minutes and I was off. The same as checking any bag. The luggage was sent to the TSA checkpoint, which would inspect the bag, assure that the hard case and two padlocks were legal and scan it to guarantee that the gun was unloaded.
It was only after walking through the passengers’ security checkpoint with my small carry-on bag that this nothing-to-it normalness was interrupted by a first stab of panic: I’d left the keys in the padlocks to the gun box, and the ticket agent had let it go. It was a rookie move for a guy who had never owned a gun before. By law, the keys must be taken by the owner. That assures that only the owner can access the case.
Now what? What if someone opened the box? What if the gun disappeared? Or what if TSA saw this as a breach of protocol and refused to put it on the plane?
I returned to the American ticket desk and explained the situation.
“No problem, let me find your luggage,” the same agent said.
Ten minutes later, she reappeared with it. I took the keys to the box’s two padlocks.
“Have a nice trip,” she said.
Despite the misstep, everything on this trip was done to duplicate Santiago’s flight. And to follow the law that enabled him to take it.
To arm myself with knowledge — and my first gun — I began by buying the Walther 9 mm PPS within 17 minutes of entering the Shoot Straight shop in Fort Lauderdale and completing the legal paperwork. Five business days later, I walked out with the unloaded gun in its box.
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Fort Lauderdale
American
Chicago
Las Vegas
Atlanta
Orlando
The Reporter’s Flights
United
Southwest
Delta
SilverAirways
Over the following weeks I took a five-hour gun-safety class for a concealed-weapons license; fired a gun for the first time; researched the laws of various states and protocols of various airlines; talked with travel and legal officials; and talked with Sun Sentinel lawyers — then talked with them again. And again.
All to cover concerns about flying with a gun that, looking back, seem like driving down I-95 at 55 mph, wondering whether anything would go wrong.
I now know that gun owners like Santiago can check their weapons as easily as their suitcases or golf clubs. That’s not to say it was all smooth flying on my trip. At Chicago’s O’Hare’s airport, for instance, the luggage — containing the gun — didn’t show up on the conveyor belt with other bags as I’d expected.
One by one, the other passengers picked up their luggage. The conveyor belt was empty, and I had no bag. Was it lost? Had I done something wrong? I went to American Airlines’ baggage-claim office.
“Oh, it’s special handling,” the agent said after looking up my baggage-claim number. “Just a minute.”
She disappeared and, waiting, I saw four rifle cases released in an oversized baggage area. I’ve flown plenty for three decades. I’ve flown to five continents. I’ve spent more than 100 days traveling some years. I’m not George Clooney from “Up in the Air,” but I’ve been around. Still, I’d never noticed a firearm in an airport until this trip. You notice what you know to notice, it seems.
The American agent appeared with my bag after a few minutes, checked my driver’s license for identification and then handed over the luggage. The locked gun box, similar to Santiago’s, was inside. The handgun was inside that, as clean as the day I bought it. It had never been fired — the two ammunition cartridges never even loaded.
The only gun I had fired was an instructor’s Glock handgun to end a class with a dozen other people for the concealed-weapons permit. I also had to fill out forms at the Department of Agriculture and get fingerprinted at its Doral office.
“How many licenses do you process a day?” I asked the official.
“Maybe 100,” she said.
Three weeks after applying, my license came in the mail. I now was one of 1.7 million Floridians with an active concealed-weapons license — about 8 percent of the state’s population — according to the Department of Agriculture.
Chicago to Las Vegas, United Airlines
So now I walked through Chicago’s O’Hare airport with that license and the padlocked gun box for a six-hour wait for a flight to Las Vegas.
Three hours before the flight, I checked the bag. The ticket agent, unlike at American, then accompanied me to hand-deliver the luggage to a TSA inspector, talking of her twin boys and impending trip to Greece.
Once the handoff to TSA was made, I walked to the passengers’ security checkpoint, which is where most issues with guns and airports intersect. TSA regional spokesman Mark Howell said 3,391 guns were confiscated nationwide at these checkpoints in 2016 (43 at Fort Lauderdale’s airport).
That’s up 25 percent from 2015, in good part because travel is up. Passengers forget they have a gun in their bag in most cases. But local law enforcement is called to measure the legality of the situation, and TSA can fine the passenger from $200 to $11,000 depending on the severity of it, Howell said.
Four hours of flying later, the luggage came up on the conveyor belt at Las Vegas’ McCarran airport with every other passenger’s baggage. That’s United’s policy for delivering handguns, as a company spokesman confirmed.
Las Vegas to Atlanta, Southwest Airlines
After two flights and no difficulty, circumstances changed abruptly the next morning. But the problem was more common to flying: My Spirit Airlines flight to Atlanta was canceled, one of hundreds of Spirit flights canceled during a contract dispute with pilots.
The ticket agent, then her supervisor, offered only to put me on a flight the following day from Las Vegas to Detroit to Fort Lauderdale and into Atlanta at midnight. Nice.
The headache in flying with a gun, I soon realized, isn’t flying with a gun. It’s simply flying. It’s squeezing shampoo into a 3.4-ounce bottle, stripping down at a checkpoint and subjecting yourself to X-rays. It’s the terminal noise, the chair in front of you reclined into your knees and, yes, flight cancellations. Checking a gun? That’s easy.
I bought a Southwest ticket at a $150 loss and sat in the airport six more hours, for the next flight to Atlanta.
I’d made a change, too. The first day of flying, I placed the locked gun box inside luggage in the manner most fliers do. For the second and third days, I ditched the luggage to follow Santiago’s method of checking only the locked gun case holding the unloaded gun and ammunition. Again, all legal.
“I need you to unlock it,” the Southwest ticket agent said after having me sign the declaration card.
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The card had to be set inside the locked box atop the 9 mm handgun and box of five shotgun shells. The gun and shells didn’t match on purpose. That way if something went wrong on this trip nothing could go too wrong.
The gun box was locked again and put on the luggage belt behind the ticket desk, just as American Airlines did. The Southwest agent then pointed to the nearby TSA door and told me to wait there.
“If no one comes for you in 20 minutes, you’re fine,” she said.
After 20 minutes, I left for the gate. Eight hours and a change of planes in Denver later, the gun box didn’t emerge in Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport on the carousel with the rest of the flight’s luggage. I talked to a Southwest agent, who pointed to a corner where such baggage was put.
There was the padlocked case, sitting unattended on a counter, with no official around. No airline agent. No security. Another passenger was picking up two pieces of luggage sitting there. I took the gun case, looked around and saw no one was interested in what I was doing. I opened the box, checked that the unloaded gun was there and walked outside.
Atlanta to Orlando, Delta Airlines
Ten hours later, I was back for a Delta flight to Orlando. I tried to use curbside check-in but was told a firearm had to be checked inside. Delta even has a check-in counter, No. 35, set up for handguns at Hartsfield, the busiest airport in the country.
The Delta agent then gave directions to take the gun case to a TSA luggage inspection room. The official took me inside, had me open the box, then swabbed it inside and out to test for “foreign materials,” she said, without explaining what those might be. Test done, the card was put back in and the re-locked case sent on its way.
All of this was a new step for Delta since the Fort Lauderdale shooting, an agent said. So was what happened upon arriving in Orlando, the agent there said. The gun box, which had to be claimed with identification at Delta’s baggage office, was wrapped with a heavy plastic tie band.
The tie band was supposed to ensure that the case couldn’t be opened immediately, the way Santiago did in Fort Lauderdale before he loaded his gun in a restroom near baggage claim, then opened fire. The band was a temporary obstacle, though.
I went to an airport gift store and bought a bottle of water.
“Can I have your scissors to cut this tie band?” I said.
“I can’t give you scissors,” the cashier said. “But I can cut it myself.”
Orlando to Fort Lauderdale, Silver Airways
That done, I had just over two hours before the fifth and final leg of the trip: Silver Airways to Fort Lauderdale. The ticket agent checked in the locked box, put the legal card inside, then carried it as I accompanied him through the airport to a TSA office.
There, as with Delta, I was asked to open the locks so the TSA agent could inspect the box before it was approved to fly. But all of that hands-on security changed after the short flight into Fort Lauderdale.
Walking through the Terminal 1 concourse, searching for the flight’s luggage carousel, I noticed the locked gun box already sitting on a stopped carousel along with a few other bags from the flight.
A few months ago, I wouldn’t have recognized a locked gun box from Samsonite luggage. A few days before, I wouldn’t have thought about the various ways airlines have passengers retrieve handguns: American and Delta required identification at baggage claims offices; United put it on the carousel with other luggage; Southwest put it aside, but unattended; Silver left it unattended on the luggage carousel.
I stared at it a minute. After five flights on five airlines with five one-way tickets, I knew what I wanted to do. It’s what most passengers want at this point of a trip. I wanted to get home.
I picked up the gun case and, uninterrupted, walked out the airport doors.
About this story
Before Esteban Santiago shot and killed five people in the Fort Lauderdale airport, he flew here on a one-way ticket from Alaska, checking nothing but his gun case.
The Sun Sentinel decided to find out how easy that was.
For three days, our reporter traveled around the country with a semi-automatic handgun, flying entirely on one-way tickets and checking only a gun.
In some cases, we packed the gun inside a suitcase, as most gun owners do when they travel. In others, we checked only the gun case, the way Santiago did.
The trip involved three months of preparation and research into gun laws and airline policies to ensure that we followed all laws. Our reporter, who had never owned a gun, bought one legally at a gun shop, completed training for a concealed-carry permit, locked the unloaded gun in a case and checked the case properly for all flights.
We packed ammunition in the case, as allowed by law — and as Santiago did — but we packed shotgun shells that did not fit the handgun. If something went wrong, the gun could not be fired.
The trip included five airlines and five airports around the country, in order to explore whether the region or airline made a difference. On the advice of our attorneys, we avoided states with particularly tough handgun laws, including New York and California.
With the trip completed, the Sun Sentinel plans to donate the 9 mm handgun to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
dhyde@sun-sentinel.com; On Twitter @davehydesports;
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