Flying With Cameras: Getting Your Kit Onto the Plane Intact

I have watched a checked suitcase come down a baggage chute end over end, and I have watched a man open it at the carousel to find out what a telephoto lens sounds like when you shake it. That was somebody else's morning, years ago, and it is the reason my cameras have never flown anywhere I couldn't see them.

Flying with camera gear is not complicated, but it punishes optimism. The whole method comes down to one sentence: pack as if everything you cannot afford to lose will stay with you, and everything else can be replaced. The rest is arithmetic and habit.

The carry-on math

Carry-on allowances are not one number. They vary by airline, by fare class, by route, and sometimes by the mood of the aircraft — a small regional jet may take bags at the gate that a larger plane would swallow without comment. Weight limits vary even more than size limits, and some carriers actually weigh cabin bags, especially on international legs.

So I don't pack to the most generous rule I've ever encountered. I pack to the least generous rule I'm likely to meet, and I assume the bag will be measured. In practice that means a soft-sided bag that genuinely fits under a seat, kept under roughly fifteen pounds, with nothing strapped to the outside. A bag that looks light gets waved through. A bag with a tripod lashed to it and lens pouches dangling like ornaments gets attention, and attention at a gate is how cameras end up in the hold with a pink tag on them.

If I truly need more glass than the bag will hold, the answer is not a bigger bag. The answer is wearing a camera on a strap through boarding — a camera around your neck is famously not luggage — and being honest with myself about how many lenses I will actually raise to my eye in a week. The honest number is smaller than the packed number, every single trip.

Batteries ride in the cabin. All of them.

This is the one part of the subject that isn't a preference. It's a rule, and it exists because lithium batteries occasionally fail by catching fire, and a fire in the cabin can be noticed and handled in a way a fire in the cargo hold cannot.

The FAA's position is plain: spare lithium batteries — meaning any battery not installed in a device — are not allowed in checked baggage. They go in the cabin with you, terminals protected so they can't short against keys or each other. I keep mine in a small pouch, each battery either in its original plastic case or with tape over the contacts. Batteries installed in a camera may technically travel checked, but I don't test that, because the camera isn't going in the hold anyway.

While I'm at it: the little coin cells in remote releases, the battery in a light meter, the power bank I charge my phone from — all of it is cabin freight. Power banks are spare batteries by definition and are treated as such. I count them when I pack and I count them again at the hotel, because a battery left in a checked bag by accident is the kind of mistake you make exactly once.

The screening table

At the checkpoint I move slowly on purpose. Electronics larger than a phone generally come out of the bag and go flat in a bin unless the officer says otherwise — checkpoints with newer scanners sometimes let everything stay packed, and the correct response to that is to do what the person in uniform tells you, cheerfully, without debating past experience at other airports.

Film is the exception worth speaking up about. The older X-ray machines were reasonably gentle with slower film, but the newer CT scanners used for carry-on bags can fog film in a single pass, and the effect is cumulative. If I'm carrying film — especially anything fast, and I treat 800 and up as fast — I take it out of the bag, put it in a clear pouch, and ask for hand inspection. In the United States you can request this, and in my experience the request is granted without drama if you're organized: film out, ready to show, no foil wrappers, boxes opened if asked. Give yourself ten extra minutes and it costs you nothing.

Never, under any circumstances, does film go in a checked bag. Checked-baggage scanners are far stronger, and they will eat your latent images without an apology.

Padding, discipline, and the cards in your pocket

Inside the bag, padding matters less than restraint. A bag with two bodies and five lenses is heavy, slow to screen, and slow to work from. My standing rule is one body, one lens mounted, one lens spare — the one-lens discipline. On a trip where I know the subject, I sometimes break the rule down to one lens, period. It photographs like freedom feels.

Each piece sits in its own padded cell so nothing touches glass. Lens caps on, hoods reversed, the mounted lens facing down so the body's weight isn't riding on the mount all day.

And then the part I'm strictest about: memory cards travel on my person. Not in the camera bag, not in the personal item — in a small wallet in my jacket pocket. The gear is insured; the photographs are not insurable. If every bag I own vanished between two airports, I would land annoyed but whole. That's the entire insurance mindset in one habit.

Overhead bin or under the seat

The overhead bin is shared territory. Bags get shoved, re-stacked, taken out by strangers looking for their own. The space under the seat in front of me is mine, and my cameras live there, even at the cost of legroom. If the bag must go overhead — small plane, full flight — it goes in the bin across the aisle where I can see it, soft side up, wheels-and-heavy-things down.

What I actually carry, generically: a small mirrorless body, a 24–70 equivalent mounted, a 70–300 zoom in its cell, four spare batteries in a taped-and-cased pouch, a card wallet in my pocket, a phone that shoots better than I admit, and a travel tripod that lives in the checked bag because it is the one thing on this list that can take the fall. Everything irreplaceable stays with me, at my feet, all the way to the ground.