Outboards on planes?

[Slowboat35]

Apologies for not digging out the letter of the rules but it’s 15 years since I last dealt with this sort of stuff.

No need to trouble yourself, it's there, chapter and verse in post #14...

 

[Slowboat35]

Hard to use it as a weapon if it's locked in the hold.

I was quite surprised by what easyJet do allow. Shotguns and ammunition, for example. Makes an outboard seem fairly harmless.

All airlines allow carriage of firearms.
Why would they not?
People really need to be a bit more imaginative about what makes things dangerous in aircraft holds. A gun and it's ammunition, given that they are packed seperately are as harmless as a piece of wood. They offer no concieveable threat to anyone except on the ground if a rogue baggage handler puts them together, and even then the hazard is not in flight to the plane and it's passengers which is what the Dangerous Goods regs address.

An engine, however, is potentially full of oil that can leak and do vast amounts of damage to other baggage and render the baggage hold lethally slippery with potential injury issues, not to mention the vast expense to the airline of a) ascertaining the nature of the contaminant, b) the risks involved in dealing with it (respiratory, contact, toxicity etc) that the airline cannot know or be able to guess without tests, plus the cleanup cost. Added to that the cost of delayed flights, rescue flights etc etc.
Plus the hazard of petrol vapour. There are few emergencies that genuinely scare pilots because they are trained to cope with most, but a cargo bay fire is outside that. Figures of ten, fifteen minutes to endex are bandied about - and totally theoretical - 'it all depends'. You simply can't get an airliner from the cruise to an evacuation in that time unless you react decisivel and instantly, are extremely lucky, in the exact right place and it happens slowly... even then if it's five or ten not fifteen...in-flight fire of any kind is a terrifying prospect.
And it is perfectly clear that if you allow the carriage of items with fuel tanks sooner or later some divot will pack one with fuel still in it and it will leak, and it only takes a few tablespoons of petrol to create a blevvy-able mixture in the baggage hold where if you were unlucky, 10 or 15 minutes wouldn't even be a part of the calculation.

That's why guns are inert and outboards usually aint.

These rules are necessarily blunt instruments - we can all suggest ways where carriage would be perfectly safe but it's easier and safer just to say NO to some things.
After all, outboards are readily purchasable the world over - so what's the necessity to fly one around from place to place?

 

[Kelpie]

So, by way of conclusion, I have just arrived off an easyJet with my outboard. I am not sure whether the bag was opened up or not, if it was then it was a cursory look.
I drained the fuel tank and then rinsed it out with alcohol, before thoroughly washing it out in two changes of hot soapy water.
I also drained out the gearbox oil, but didn't wash/rinse because I thought that would lead to corrosion inside. So I just put the drain plugs back in.
I dismantled the motor primarily to make it short enough to go in the bag. I then wrapped each individual section in a plastic bag, and rolled the whole lot up in a dinghy sail which I was carrying.

I had hoped to speak to security at Glasgow airport first but that proved impossible.

Anyway, all's well that ends well. And now I can vote on my poll!

 

[PabloPicasso]

Following suggestions on here, I contacted easyJet directly. Took a while to get through on their chat service but eventually I got there.



So that seems pretty straightforward. I've taken a photo of the chat window, only thing I can really think of to prove it happened.

Well I wish you well with that. Do please let us know how it goes.

 

[Kelpie]

Well I wish you well with that. Do please let us know how it goes.

It went well. Full description is in the post above yours.