Maybe 37mm. That was a popular Soviet anti-aircraft caliber (same functional slot as a Bofors 40mm in the West). But I can’t tell if that looks like an AA round or what.
If only they had included a banana for scale in that picture.
Live or not, TSA does not allow ammunition aboard aircraft, and I suspect the same is true in Israel. Security personnel do not want to be tasked with figuring out whether a round is live or not; the simplest, safest thing is just to say “no ammunition of any kind”.
Some years ago I received a gift of a 30mm round. It was inert, a replica made for testing the autofeed mechanism. Replica ammunition is also not allowed on planes, so I shipped it home via USPS. Turns out I didn’t follow the rules there either, because I didn’t present it at the counter, didn’t send it via registered mail, and I didn’t write “REPLICA AMMUNITION” on the outside of the box. Oops.
From the OP’s article, I found this interesting—
The airports authority said the family was allowed to board their flight after an interrogation by security staff, who declared an all-clear.
I don’t know much about Israeli procedures, but I genuinely can’t help wondering if a non-American family would be treated that way. Does anybody have any good idea?
In this 2015 test, they failed 95%
When you have idjits like that trying to leave your country, sometimes the best course of action is to let them leave your country.
Yes. They grilled me because I hadn’t completely filled out my (entirely voluntary, just-for-fun) scuba diary.
I’m sure that their bags were checked carefully to make sure they weren’t also accidentally smuggling, say, a Claymore mine, but the fact that they presented teh shell to security and asked if they could take it abroad seems to have convinced them that they weren’t malicious, merely stupid. The security authorities probably decided that there was no point in keeping them around, and that punishing them for an obvious mistake would serve no purpose.
In this context, the punishment probably would have been “immediate removal from the country,” and since they were going that way anyway, well…
Yeah, Brother Louie (an English prof at my university) used to hitchhike around the west in the summer (I’m assuming not in his OSB robes). He said he could get across Montana pretty quickly because deputies would pick him, drive him over to the next county with a either implicit or explicit “don’t come back to my county”. Generally the next county guys would find him shortly (don’t know if they got a head’s up or not), rinse and repeat.