Just fly in a friendlier jurisdiction

Just fly in a friendlier jurisdiction

There's a lot of controversial stuff going on in politics at any given time. Some of it tends to revolve around what might be legal in a certain jurisdiction. In this part of the world, some states are trying to stop certain activities, and they sometimes succeed at it. A lot of this is in the news this week, and particularly this evening. When these new laws succeed, it basically means the people who live in those states must now exit those states in order to make something happen.

Of course, if you live in a really big state far from any borders, this is no small task. It takes a fair number of resources in order to be mobile. Just look at what happened in 2005 with the people who were stuck in New Orleans during Katrina since they simply did not have any way to travel short of walking, and that wasn't nearly enough.

If you're in a place where it takes a day of driving just to get to the next political entity, and even that might not be compatible with your goals, you will probably find yourself unable to accomplish certain things. Whether that's smoking something, drinking something, or certain medical procedures, you might not be able to do it at home... legally, that is.

If you have to go to another jurisdiction but can't actually get there, then what do you do? That brings me to my latest half-baked idea: bring a friendlier jurisdiction to you.

I've read some things online which suggest that the inside of an aircraft is effectively treated as the soil of whatever country in which it is registered. There are a bunch of forum posts in which armchair lawyers pontificate on the subject and give examples. One of them talks about someone who flew a US-registered plane across the Bering Strait to Russia. It had a GPS on board and apparently that's normally illegal in Russia, but it was okay in this case as long as it stayed on the plane and thus "in" the US.

This makes me wonder about turning it around. What if some country with compatible laws flew in a plane, landed it, picked up potential clients, then took off and started doing whatever they intended to do? I understand some airlines serve booze to people at 18 instead of 21 thanks to policies like this, so why not bring over the whole gamut of things which people need?

All it would take is someone with a few airplanes, a bit of money which could be spared for running the operation, and who doesn't mind pushing the envelope to get things done. I can think of one or two airline moguls who might fit this description.

The question is: who's going to be the first to bring a chunk of friendly "soil" into these embattled states in order to help out the less-fortunate who live there?