Thanksgiving means many things to Americans: family, feast, home - even thanks for plenty. But for many, this year's holiday will be remembered for the misery of airport security checks, which, in addition to being long, for some travellers got rather more personal.
A US Transport Security Administration announcement played on public address systems at airports around the country thanked the travelling public "for being our partners in security. For your safety, we have instituted new screening procedures at checkpoints."
Those procedures meant, for many passengers, a so-called "pat-down" full body search. TSA people may have been a bit over-enthusiastic; accounts of volatile passenger responses are many and the phrase "don't touch my junk" entered popular language. One TSA screener was quoted as saying: "We just want the public to understand that we're not perverts."
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Technology may come to the rescue. Smiths Detection, the threat and contraband detection division of the UK's Smiths diversified technology group, has got a handful of its innovative eqo (say "echo") body scanners operating at London's Gatwick and Heathrow airports in the UK and in Japan and South Korea.
Unlike the X-ray body scanners that generate realistic images of passengers' bodies - to the anger of some passengers and titillation of some operators - these machines operate by millimetre-wave radar.
Smiths is working on the software behind the machines and hopes to develop an automated threat detection capability that would generate a standard-manikin image overlaid with a picture of any potential threat objects on a passenger's person. Eqo will not do away with the need for physical body searches, but may reduce their incidence.
Perhaps closer to realisation is what Smiths is calling a "revolution" in carry-on baggage scanning. Its Hi-Scan 6040aTiX X-ray inspection system promises to detect explosives "in real time without hampering usual checkpoint measures". Following trials to begin in early 2011 in the USA, what that means for passengers is that laptop computers may no longer have to be removed from bags at the security check.
MOTIVATED BY THREAT
These advances - and what is improving are the computer algorithms that analyse the now three-dimensional data generated by X-ray machines like the 6040 - are a clear sign that incidents running back to Lockerbie are driving a competitive security systems industry to keep pushing to stay ahead of the terrorists.
Smiths Detection president Stephen Phipson says that in the past three or four years explosives detection technology has improved dramatically, driven by US government investment.
That government-led drive is critical, he says, as there is no private market for this equipment. He stresses that what is needed is a common regulatory framework to allow companies like Smiths to work towards what must, given the desire to minimise airport delays, be one system that would check for all security threats.
As Smiths noted in an interim statement in November, following its first quarter, while prospects are good following the foiled Yemeni cargo bombs plot, "sales in the period are behind last year as some large orders from various government agencies have been delayed[and] we expect orders to be delayed until new air cargo regulations are confirmed".
Smiths Detection commands 32% of the world market, with sales up 15% to £574 million ($890 million), including £224 million in aviation, in its fiscal year to 31 July. The nearest rival, with 15%, is Safran Group's Morpho division, which last year spent $580 million to buy 81% of GE's Homeland Protection scanners business.
Smiths does about half its business with the US government Homeland Security and Defense departments, in aviation and port scanning equipment and military detectors for nuclear, biological and chemical threats. The company has eight manufacturing operations, in North America, Germany, France, Russia and the UK, selling to over 150 countries.
Smiths employs 600 engineers with an annual research and development budget of £45-50 million, plus another £10-20 million in government funding.
About 7% of sales are in Smiths' home UK market. Phipson describes that as small, but he considers the company's UK base to be a strength, as the country is a thought leader in security, with great influence globally.
Source: Flight International
