For Your Flying Pleasure
Readers here may or may not remember that I had gone to Boston for a week last month for training on a new piece of screening equipment. In this mornings Argus there is a story on this new piece of baggage screening equipment that will be installed in the next few weeks at the Sioux Falls Regional Airport.
The CT-80 is a CT imaging scanner similar to what is used in the medical field that will be used to scan your checked baggage for explosives and will replace many of the current Explosive Trace Detection units that the TSA currently uses.
What will this mean for the flying public? If you’ve ever flown and found one of those nice little notes from the TSA letting you know they had opened and inspected your luggage you would have discovered that your bag was one of the as many as 60 percent of the bags that receive closer inspection by the TSA. This machine will make that unnecessary. With the TSA not having to perform that many open bag inspections, your wait in the check-in line should be significantly shortened.
What does this mean to me and why am I writing about it? Well as someone that has worked in the electronics field for almost 25 years, it is still cool to get a chance to work on the latest technology out there and this unit definitely fits into that category.
The site notes it is an EDS machine. There are about 50 meanings attached with that acronym.
CT scanning indicates it is an X-ray system.
So what happens if luggage contains a bomb triggered by x-ray excitation of some kind of switch?
Sure wouldn’t want Condoleeza to be asking, “Who would ever have thought terrorists would turn a CT scanner into a weapon of terror on [very specific date]”
They shouldn’t have been wondering about the airplane either after a 4-engined pot-plane flew from the US/Mexican border to west of Pierre, SD without being detected.
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