With all due respect to the various legal professionals that keep posting warnings here about the (admittedly) dire legal implications of our trying to take care of ourselves, this is a very fundamental conflict. Government “needs” to be “needed” to justify everything they want to do (“for your own sake”, of course), so any attempt at independence or self-sufficiency is by it’s very nature a threat to government authority. Even obeying the law itself is at best a hit-and-miss approach to staying out of trouble with the law, it’s no guarantee. As you’ve found out, you have to stay informed on the laws constantly just to see if you suddenly became a felon today, or might be one tomorrow… and often, not even the professionals who devote their whole careers to it can tell you with any certainty what’s legal and what’s not. You’ll get nailed if they want to nail you.<br><br>Specific to this subject at hand, having ANY legitimate excuse to carry a sharp implement might create a problem for them. You dying because you don’t have one does NOT create a problem for them. So, why can’t you be a good citizen and just die quietly?<br><br>Ok, enough soapbox. <br><br>Personally, I’d be very surprised if they let you on an airliner with any pair of pliers, or just about any metal object that size, for that matter. I’d be willing to bet that if you took the blades out of a Leatherman, they’d confiscate it anyway, and you aren’t getting it back. Remember that they were confiscating nail clippers, plastic knitting needles, nail files and tweezers at one point.. and I’d bet some still are. They've never been at all uniform in what they allow on planes and don't.<br><br>If you’re serous about playing by the school’s rules, you might take a look at the Leatherman Mini. It’s a full-sized pair of needlenose pliers, but the handles fold twice, so the closed length is just two and three-quarters of an inch. Because of the double-folding handles, the file and knife blades are each an inch and a half long, and they do not lock. Unfortunately, that’s about all there is- the end of the file blade serves as a screwdriver, and there are bottle and can openers of sorts cut into the handles, wire cutters in the pliers, and a short ruler. Beats the heck out of nothing at all, though.<br><br>I’m looking forward to seeing the new Leatherman “Micra”-sized tools that have tiny pliers instead of the scissors. However, like some others already on the market, the pliers may be just too small to do much.<br>