International Shipping Woes Doubling Down...

On first sight the problem is the airline which refuses to transport the swords.
The interesting thing is the reason why the airline(s) doesn't ship them.
Who prohibits the shipping of swords, the airline itself due to internal rules and/or experienced problems? 

I’m not surprised Paul.

This is what’s happened to me for my last 3 purchases, 1 from KOA and 2 separate orders from Lockwood to the UK.

All three were meant to be shipped via USPS.
All three actually ended up going via UPS even though both vendors insist they had initiated the shipping via USPS.

Two of the three whilst flying swiftly across the Atlantic then went through extended customs clearance where I had to prove costs and prove they met UK weapons legislation.
For those two, it took approximately a month just to clear customs and the charges I had to pay were higher than a previous Albion i’d also bought from KOA earlier in the year (which also cleared customs in a matter of days).

The third sword, my second Lockwood, still hasn’t cleared customs yet.

So, in summary, something has changed just since the conversations I had with Holg in the original thread and since my KOA purchase earlier in the year.

It looks like that the problem is with the commercial airlines, who carry the bulk of USPS shipments. Years ago I worked a lot with our shipping department in getting orders shipped to the EU, and the vast majority of shipments flew as cargo on commercial (passenger carrying) jets. Shipments had to conform to the rules for cargo on their jets. UPS, DHL, and FedEx have their own airplanes, so they have different rules. From the labels Paul showed, it's the airlines who are rejecting swords. Swords coming out of China would likely go on Chinese carriers, who would have their own rules.

You can argue legality at destination, customs, and whatnot all you want, but if the airline says no, it doesn't fly. Best bet is to stick with UPS and hope it goes on one of their planes, although that's not a guarantee. UPS sometimes subcontract some of the cargo onto a commercial carrier, which means the package falls under the commercial carriers' rules.

Extremely dangerous. We were in chemical industry and the fines under US law for false declaration was $25,000/day/item, and up to 10 years in prison for the person whose name was on the manifest.

xray = röntgen?

For what it’s worth, I bought an antique bayonet from a UK dealer recently. I’m in Florida. It went door to door in four days.
Not a sword, and leaving (not entering) the UK, but it sure didn’t make the trip on a boat.

How was it shipped? The carrier may be an option for US to EU.

USPS was the carrier out of the UK? I would expect they would handle the delivery stateside, but I didn't know they had shipping offices in foreign countries.

^^^^^^

Definitely! We used to transfer formulas for manufacture at our locations in the EU, and I frequently found it impossible to have components shipped from US to the EU, ostensibly because the US item didn't meet health and safety standards. But it was ok once we identified an EU supplier who made the same stuff. It was also ok to export the EU material to the US. I remember having the EU and US materials analysed looking for the differences... never found any and we went down to the ppt levels looking for them.