Just as there are public transit lost-and-found bureaux stuffed to the gills with furled, frayed and forlorn umbrellas, there must somewhere in aviation world be an office of orphaned pocket knives, an unfolding emporium of sharps confiscated by post-9/11 airport wand-wavers.

And while it’s perhaps no great tragedy to have Uncle Buck’s Buck knife lifted off one’s person, it’s quite another to relinquish one’s cherished Swiss Army knife in the name of safer air travel. For that wondrously simple scarlet tool is as much objet d’art as fish-gutter, as much at home in the catalogue of influential design as it is in the kit bag of the Alpine infantryman.