I happened to fly from Nottingham East Midlands airport lately and had an opportunity to see airport security in action. It's been shortly after British police discovered terrorist plans on attacking trans-Atlantic planes. The ban on taking anything but passport, ticket and absolutely necessary medicines on-board was no longer in force, but one still couldn't have a simple bottle of water on them when passing through a boarding gate.

The reason is pretty straightforward — the terrorists caught earlier were believed to plan on using liquid explosives, which they would have gotten on-board pretending to carry some perfectly legal at that time beverages.

One would have thought that the only reasonable way to react is to forbid carrying in any liquids on-board, which is exactly what's been done — until now one cannot pas through the boarding gate carrying a bottle of water.

Good, right?

To be honest, not really. It takes a really dumb suicide bomber to try the once discovered method of smuggling explosives on-board again. In fact in this situation every other method of blowing up a plane is better than the widely expected one. And this is a great example of situation when blind following a checklist doesn't pay off — one could probably get quite a lot of Semtex packed in some non-obvious places through, provided it's not bottle-shaped and not very liquid.

So, why do they do this? My bet is — for people to feel safe and taken care of or for airlines to lose as few customers as possible. Pick whichever explanation you like better.