What do you think would happen if you flew with a fursuit on? :)

In our current environment, you would not be permitted to board the plane. With any luck, however, you might not end up on a government watch list.

A full fursuit would conceal your identity. This is not permitted today with our concerns over security.

Even if it were allowed, sitting in a cramped airliner seat for a number of hours without the possibility of removing it (lack of room) strikes me as the height of stupidity.

Wearing a tail or ears might get past security concerns. No promises. Be prepared to remove them immediately if requested.

I don't know if anyone's tried to wear a fursuit on a commercial airliner. I doubt it because of the above concerns.

Heck, you probably wouldn't get 100 feet into the terminal without being tagged by security and questioned.

No, they have NO sense of humor these days.

-----------------------------------------------
David M Stein, DI

"Not Unlike the Toaster, I Control the Darkness"
-- Abby Normal, "You Suck"

Don't try it. At all.

Concealment of identity is a big issue. Better just wait until you get to Anthrocon.

I'd strongly advise against it!

A good percentage of those air marshals are hunters! Y'all end up a trophy on the wall! D:

You won't get through the entry portal to the Terminal without removing at the very least the head, and depending on the security drone in question the entire thing. Large, bulky clothing which can be used to conceal various items will not win you any friends, nor will attempting to conceal your face and/or hands.

I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that you'll not come within viewing distance of a plane in a full costume. You'll be lucky in some ways if security doesn't chose to detain you temporarily as a disturbance--the TSA and its employees are exceedingly picky about keeping the natural order of things in airports, and you're sure to set off red flags simply by being in costume.

And this isn't getting into the airline itself, which may deny you boarding to avoid inconveniencing other passengers on the flight. Nothing against suiters in general, but you're a bit of a hazard and a liability.

May I suggest, as others have, not to even try?

I have a suggestion: Don't be an attention-whore.

It's folks that do things like that that make me have to carefully consider every time I want to go to a furmeet, lest a coworker catch me chilling with people who think it's socially acceptable to wear ears and a tail in public outside of a con environment and talk loudly about "yiffing". The world needs less furries shouting to the world that they're furry and more furries showing just a little more pragmatism.

If you're still determined to go through with your plan, then best of luck to you. Can I ask you, though, please not to mention Anthrocon's name if you are questioned by security?

"What do you think would happen if you flew with a fursuit on? :)"

Well you probably wouldn't get to the con as fast as if you flew without it on. Fur fabric offers a lot of wind resistance, so getting off the ground would probably require more physical exertion than anything.

That and if you chose to wear it on the airplane, you'd probably succeed in making other passengers scared and or uncomfortable and most likely make the flight attendants' jobs more difficult when they have to pull some reason out of their a$$' as to when passengers ask "Uh... what is that and why is it there?".

If humoring yourself involves making others feel uncomfortable or making a small part of their lives difficult, then I guess that's your thing.

Personally I never got the whole "Squick the mundanes!" thing myself. I always saw it as "Hey cool now that I'm a furry, I can get revenge on the rest of society for all the bullshit I had to deal with growing up by making everyone _else_ uncomfortable, angry and frustrated. Hah! This is for all the years I spent in highschool taking shit from people!". It's kind of a dick move, but hey different jokes for different blokes I guess.

Please try to keep civil, we're all mature people here. Flaming and ignorance will be ignored, unless there is some significant humor involved.

Even Kiss had to remove their makeup to enter Japan, and that was decades before 9-11.

If you were to get on a Southwest plane, I suspect the crew would be having some fun and not in a bad way. I've always enjoyed Southwest.

But in my opinion, the only time I felt comfortable on a plane, it was in the winter by the windows. Otherwise, I was generally miserably hot with a tee-shirt and jeans on. So, I don't know if first class would be any more comfortable in such a warm outfit during the summer.

Cheers,

Rover T. Mutt

1) Without trying to attribute motives, but to simply look at the possibilities or probabilities of what one is likely to experience through the exercise, here are a few thoughts on the matter:

a) Without knowing if you are an experienced and conditioned veteran of fursuiting, lets take as a given that wearing a fursuit, especially over even light street-clothes, is going to get hot and sweaty, perhaps uncomfortably so, maybe even intolerably so. Once committed to this course, there will be precious little opportunity to shed the suit and then carry it, though the best bet for that will be in an airport terminal public restroom. There are really no private spaces aboard a civil airliner that will have any maneuvering room to get into and out of a suit; so, for starters, you are risking a deal of stress to your body by trying this. I would say that this is a negative point.

b) Fursuits all seem to have limited visibility; this might be regarded by the boarding agent as reason enough to prohibit you from walking up a ramp or stairs or an enclosed boarding-tunnel, too many things to miss seeing and either tripping over or getting caught on, as you board the aircraft. As you walk down an aisle - even in Roomy First-Class - it is too easy to miss seing the open overhead storage hatch, or miss the person sitting below your line of vision, or for your tail (I presume that your suit will have a tail?) to get caught in a seat or armrest. The airline may regard this as an unnecessary increase in liability risk, and might refuse to board you, presuming that you had no problems with the airport authorities or the TSA.

c) For the very same reasons, disembarking the plane in event of an emergency, would also be more challenging than it needs to be. Can you quickly leave your seat in a cabin rapidly filling with toxic and dense smoke, and make your way to the proper emergency exit, and smoothly and quickly egress the plane? Of course, in such an extreme circumstance, you would dump the head; but a loose-fitting suit and/or tail can again get caught in something, hindering you, and the people behind you. If any of the flightcrew have the slightest doubts on this matter, since the FAA holds them responsible for ensuring maximum chance for people to escape the plane, then they will not hesitate to remove you from the flight - and you would have no recourse, the FAA and federal law would back their opinion to the hilt.

d) Fellow passengers - this could go either way, frankly. Some folks would object to sitting next to an anthropomorphic wolf, particularly if there is any sort of odor from the fursuit. Other folks might be delighted for the bit of whimsey that this would introduce into their flight experience, particularly someone travelling with children. I can see this as being a very strong motivation to try the stunt - but it is a gamble. People might find it pleasant to talk to you, and yet not appreciate sitting next to, let alone talking to, and anthropomorphic wolf (or fox, or whatever your fursuit might be). And I cannot think of any way to determine in advance just how your fellow passengers would react.

e) Security - as it happens, a prominent member of the furry fandom, or at least the husband of one of the major artists within that fandom, has had experience as a TSA gate agent. He worked at LAX for about a year and a half, plus or minus, and would post LiveJournal accounts of what sort of hell his day at the airport had been. The general impression one received reading his accounts was of an agency at the very bottom of Federal Enforcement Agencies, and the caliber and judgement of both the front-line workers and their managers, leaves one very much in doubt about something like a sense of humor and whimsey; it seems that it isn't allowed. Anything out of the ordinary and mundane will receive scrutiny well beyond the ordinary and mundane, and if you are unwilling to be a happy part of the heard of livestock being shuttled through the cattle chutes, then you will, like as not, be denied access to the terminal.

NOW - all that being said, if you were still intent on doing something like this, consider the possibility of doing it as a GROUP of people, say for the flightleg from the midwest to Pittsburgh. Get a group of fursuiters together, welll in advance of AnthroCon, and approach both an airline and the terminal authority and the TSA, with EXACTLY what you want to do, who and how many would be involved, and a reasonable explanation of why you wish to do this, and what everyone can expect in the way of timing, mobility, crowd effect, and what you are willing to do, how far you are willing to bend, to comply with security and safety measures. Do this with a LOT of lead time, be willing to do a lot of back-and-forth correspondence with some corporate public-relations type at the airline who might be able to ease the path through the TSA, and be willing to do a lot of compromise.

Heck - if you go through Frontier Airlines, who have their aircraft all decked out with critters on the tail, you might even get their enthusiastic support and assistance, and your pictures taken. It all depends on how you approach it.

...But whatever you do, DON'T do this as a spontaneous act, just showing up; you might find yourself missing AnthroCon, if you do.