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Building Tips and technical articles. => Paint and finishing => Topic started by: Howard Rush on December 11, 2013, 10:09:23 AM
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Will airport detectors identify an airplane painted with nitrate dope as an explosive?
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Good question. Why not just paint with butyrate? Or, in this day and age, perhaps poster paint would be perceived as more appropriate by the average TSA employee?
"Aircraft dope" on Wikipedia links nitrocellulose dope to guncotton; the Wikipedia guncotton page has the following:
However, around 1846 Christian Friedrich Schönbein, a German-Swiss chemist, discovered a more practical solution. As he was working in the kitchen of his home in Basel, he spilled a bottle of concentrated nitric acid on the kitchen table. He reached for the nearest cloth, a cotton apron, and wiped it up. He hung the apron on the stove door to dry, and, as soon as it was dry, there was a flash as the apron exploded.
I'm trying to decide if he's my kind of guy, or if I were visiting someone's house and noticed concentrated reagents on the kitchen table, if I might just utter polite nothings as I edged out the door and then ran like hell.
Edit:
I know you're looking for an actual answer, which I don't have. But I suspect that what will show up on their little wipes will be powdered nitrocellulose -- so if you don't sprinkle your baggage with sanding dust, you may be fine. On the other hand, even if you don't have nitrate dope on that particular plane, if you have sanding dust from some other plane on your baggage, you may be in for an interesting conversation at the baggage counter.