Hello friends. Flying from Seattle to Denver and had couple of open 4x5 boxes (TMax 100, Ektar, Velvia 50) and some sealed ones. The film inside the open ones is packaged in the internal plastic bag and in the triple boxes.
The TSA officer insisted on opening the most outer box then he ran the swaps on them. He left the sealed boxes as is.
With that being said, my question is with removing the most outer box but leaving the sheets inside the internal black plastic bag inside 2 boxes, are these sheets gone?
My guess is that they’re still good and not exposed but I can’t stop obsessing getting confirmation from the community. What do you think?
Kodak films have a sealed light-tight inner bag, plus a 3-part outer clamshell box, so are well protected. But in the past, I've seen some EU film sheet film packaging which is poorly protected. Still, that's seems a bit aggressive for TSA in my own experience. Perhaps they were on high alert for some reason, or were minus more experienced personnel at the time.
The 90 degree angles are the light’s enemy. Unless they’re shining a flashlight all up in there I suspect you are ok. Still not a great feeling though.
If your film wasn’t in a lightproof plastic bag, I’d probably suspect the top sheet but wouldn’t worry about the rest. I recently turned the darkroom lights on but I forgot to close up the plastic bag and put it in the box. Fortunately the bag opening was facing away from the light source. The top sheet was significantly fogged, but everything under it had a tiny bit of light beer at the edge. Your case doesn’t sound nearly as bad, so I doubt the lower sheets are affected at all, but out of caution I’d use the top sheet for something unimportant.