This is an article about an experiment I ran in 2022 which made me feel quite relaxed about flying with film, and the much more thorough work done by someone else a couple of years later that has made me less relaxed about it again. Both halves matter. The first half is the story of what happened to a bag of my film when it went through six airport scanners by accident. The second half is what we now know about whether that result generalises.
The trip
In November of 2021 I went to Costa Rica for four weeks with work. I packed a Yashica 635 and a bag of medium format film: Bergger Pancro 400, Ilford FP4 Plus, Fuji Pro 400H and a roll of Lomography Color Negative 100. Standard travel kit for someone hoping to get some shots on rest days.
The job turned out to be more punishing than I had been led to expect. The Yashica stayed in my camera bag for the whole four weeks. The films stayed with it. I went home with a camera I had not used and a bag of film that had been through somewhere in the region of six airport scans across the trip. Heathrow to Miami to San Jose Costa Rica on the way out, then the same route in reverse on the way home. Hand luggage every time, including the films.
When I noticed three weeks in that the bag had been going through scanners since I left home, the damage if any was already done. There was no point pulling the films out at that point. They were going home the way they had come, scanners and all. I decided I would shoot the rolls when I got back and see what the result looked like. Six scans on a mixed bag of ISO 100 to 400 stock was, I thought at the time, a reasonable accidental test of whether the conventional wisdom held up.
The test, when I got home
Once back in the UK in January 2022 I shot the bag of films to see what they came out like. The Yashica went back on the shelf for now. The Bronica S2A came out instead, because my workflow had moved on to the medium format SLR and I was more confident in the negatives it produced.
Three rolls got shot before I had what I needed for an answer. The Fuji Pro 400H went into the camera first. I took my daughter for a walk near the house and put some frames through it as she climbed a stile and ran ahead through the field. Pro 400H is forgiving stuff and was as forgiving here as it always was. The negatives I was looking at for evidence of radiation damage were checked for the usual signs. Waves, fogging, base discolouration, opened-up shadows where shadows should not have opened. None of these showed up on the Fuji.
The Bergger Pancro 400 was next. I had a job in West London the following week and stopped on the way back at Windsor to shoot the swans on the Thames. The Queen’s swans, technically, since by ancient prerogative the Crown owns most unmarked mute swans on certain stretches of the river. The swans themselves were not in a posing mood. I worked the 150mm Nikkor on the Bronica for some longer reach and got a roll of frames out before the keepers started feeding the birds and the moment for being on their level had passed. Pancro 400 is more contrasty than I expected at first, but the negatives looked exactly as a roll of Pancro should look. No fog or waves where they should not have been.
The final film was the Lomography Color Negative 100. I drove up to Dursley one morning specifically to test something low-ISO. ISO 100 colour was the most marginal case in the bag. Less ISO means less radiation sensitivity in theory, but it also means any damage would be easier to spot against a clean low-grain emulsion. I was uninspired in Dursley town centre and ended up at Breakheart Quarry, which is a small former quarry on the edge of town that has been given over as a nature reserve. The light was a bit flat but the texture of the stone walls made for honest negatives. Day three I went into Bristol harbourside in low winter sun and finished the roll there.
The Lomo 100 results were the most interesting of the three. There was no detectable scanner damage in the body of the frames. Exposure and grain looked normal. Colour balance behaved as you would expect from this film stock. But there were some odd edge effects on the negatives that looked like light leaks. I am fairly sure these were nothing to do with the scanners. Lomography Color Negative 100 is famously twitchy about how tightly the roll is wound, and I had been a bit sloppy loading. Bright conditions plus loose winding equals exactly the kind of edge leak I was seeing.
The 2022 conclusion
So the verdict at the time was reassuring. Six scans, no damage that I could attribute to the scanners. ISO 100 to 400 across colour and black and white. The films behaved exactly as they should.
The official guidance at the time, and as the labels on the canisters reminded us, was that anything ISO 1600 and below should be fine through standard X-ray scanners. My test was consistent with that. I went away thinking, with some confidence, that the hand-check anxiety many film photographers carried around airports was probably overblown for the films most people shoot.
This was, it turned out, a tidy conclusion that did not hold up as well as I thought it would.
What I have learned since
A few years after I ran this test, a film photographer called Lina Bessonova ran a much bigger one. She gathered a wide range of film stocks across ISO and format. She set up controlled exposures of the same scene on each. The films then went through both standard X-ray scanners and the new CT scanners that have been rolling out at airports. She compared the resulting frames meticulously. It is the kind of thorough work that puts my four rolls of accidental testing into perspective. Her writeup is here and it is worth your eye if you fly with film regularly.
The headlines from her results that change my 2022 conclusion are these. Regular X-ray scanners do start showing damage on medium format film well before the official ISO 1600 cutoff. The damage can show up at ISO 400 and even lower with enough scans. My specific test of six scans on ISO 100 to 400 was right at the edge of where her tests start to show effects, and it is likely that my negatives held some level of damage I either did not look hard enough for or could not isolate against the natural variation in film exposure and scanning. The 35mm canisters seem to protect a little better than 120 backing paper does, which Lina’s work makes clear. My test was 120 throughout, which puts me on the more exposed side of that gap.
The bigger issue is CT scanners. These were rare in 2022 but have been steadily rolling out at major airports since. They scan the bag in three dimensions using a much higher radiation dose than the traditional flat X-ray. CT scanners damage film at any ISO. They are particularly bad for high-ISO stocks and push-processed films. They are also bad for any film you have already exposed and are bringing home. Lina lost twenty rolls of documentary work to a single CT scan in Geneva because she did not realise the airport had switched scanners. Heathrow, which featured in my own test, has been steadily transitioning to CT scanners in the years since I filmed.
So what should you do
The short version. Be more careful than I was in 2022.
ISO 400 colour film through one or two standard X-ray scanners is probably fine. ISO 100 black and white through the same is almost certainly fine. Six scans on either of those is closer to the edge than I assumed at the time, but the edge is mostly soft. You may see a small amount of fog or some shadow opening that you did not intend. The picture is rarely ruined.
CT scanners change the calculation. If your bag goes through a CT scanner, your film at any ISO is at risk. Heathrow, Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and most of the bigger US hubs now use CT scanners as standard. The damage looks like soft vignetting and shadow fog rather than the wave patterns of X-ray damage. With a single CT scan you may have a film that is salvageable in post but is not the film you intended to take home.
For ordinary travel the practical advice that has held up well is this. Hand-luggage your film. Ask for a hand check, politely, with a clear plastic bag of loose canisters ready to make the agent’s life easier. If you are going through TSA in the US, you can point to the published policy that permits hand inspection on request. If you are denied, find out whether the scanner is X-ray or CT. X-ray under ISO 800 you are probably fine with. CT at any ISO, accept some damage and shoot the film anyway. Modern colour negative film has more latitude than the damage costs you. Black and white film is more forgiving still.
What you should not do is panic. Mailing the film home separately or flying without it are both worse strategies than carrying it with you. Checked baggage scanners are much more damaging than carry-on scanners. The post is unreliable and many couriers run their parcels through their own X-ray machines anyway. Hand luggage in a clear pouch with a polite request for hand inspection remains the best strategy for any film photographer who is flying with their work.
A small confession
Looking back at this experiment with what I now know, I should probably have done two things differently when I shot those rolls in January 2022. I should have shot a known-good control roll of each film at the same time to compare against. And I should have looked harder at the edges and shadow areas of the test negatives for low-level fogging that I may have missed against the variation in exposure across the frames. The conclusion that the films were fine was the conclusion I wanted, and that is always a sign to look at your evidence with a slightly more sceptical eye.
The Yashica, since you asked, has not been on a plane since.