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when most Passengers droP oFF theIr luggage at an airport, they assume that their bags will be scanned for dangerous items. But before 9/11, almost all baggage went straight from the check-in counter to the hold of an aircraft without any assurance that there were no bombs or biological weapons inside. Then, just before Christmas 1988, a forty-nine-year-old man with curly black hair and a long nose arrived at the airport in Luqa, Malta, carrying a suitcase. Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the head of security for Libya Arab Airlines, headed to the departures counter and checked his bag through Londons Heathrow Airport and on to New Yorks Kennedy. He then hopped on a short flight back across the Mediterranean to Libya. At Heathrow, his unaccompanied luggage was transferred onto Pan Ams Flight 103. Just a half hour into the flight to New York, a timing device hidden inside a cassette player in al-Megrahis suitcase set off a military-grade plastic explosive called Semtex and blew a gaping hole in the aircrafts wall. Oxygen levels are much lower at cruising altitudes than they are on the ground, so aircraft interiors are pressurized, allowing passengers to breathe normally and stewards to recite their immortal preflight mantra: In case of sudden lost of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling . . .

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Permanent emergency

But this pressure differential also creates a massive force pushing outward on the walls of a plane. As a result, bombs that puncture an aircrafts skin at high altitudes are far more destructive than they would be on the ground. In the wake of the bomb blast and the pursuant outward rushing force, the airplane quickly disintegrated, killing all 243 passengers, sixteen crew members, and even eleven people hit by debris on the ground. The event became known as the Lockerbie bombing, after the Scottish village unfortunate enough to be directly underneath the devastated aircrafts path when the bomb hit. The event was the worst terrorist disaster in the history of American air travel. The Federal Aviation Administration issued regulations to prevent a repeat of such a tragedy, most notably a requirement that US carriers ensure that passengers on international flights travel with their luggage. Taken by themselves, the regulations made sense but, in a classic example of the pre9/11 regulatory logic, the precautions only eliminated a narrow sliver of possible attacks. For example, the new laws would do little to prevent an attacker willing to die in the explosion from checking bombs onto domestic flights. Most Americans did not envision this scenario. But the Lockerbie bombing did nudge scanning technology forward. On the few flights where luggage was screened before going into an aircrafts holdprimarily international flightsx-rays had been the industry standard for decades, using dated machines that were only effective at identifying the outlines of metallic weapons like guns, knives, or metal bomb components. But after Flight 103 went down, some companies looked into developing the technology used in medical CT imaging to scan baggage for explosives. CT (computed tomography) machines are essentially densitometers. When a hospital patient is rolled into one of the giant white machines, the devices within are able to identify the different densities between, say, a tumor and normal brain tissue. Explosives also have specific densities, and by adapting the CTs algorithm for airports, screeners could easily detect the difference in density between peanut butter, clothing, and explosivesor anything else that might be packed away in luggage. Following Lockerbie, a small market developed for a state-of-the-art explosives detection system (EDS) that could replace the decades-old x-ray machines and their blurry images. But while these EDS machines had exquisite imaging capability that had the potential to be an important bulwark against terrorism, in practice they were riddled with mechanical problems. They cost around a million dollars a pop, measured about seven by eight feet, weighed in at eight tons, and had

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massive external power requirements. The floors at some airports had to be reengineered to support their weight. There was also another problem typical of government contracting. Because of a congressional earmark, the FAA had to buy an equal number of machines from two different manufacturers, Invision and L3. Having two suppliers can have advantages, but it certainly didnt in the case of the EDS machines. The machines massive price tag meant that the FAA could only afford to buy three or four a year. Worse, one vendors machines consistently broke down when the belt conveyer system fed suitcases. But the FAA had to buy them anyway, or Congress wouldnt approve the purchase in its appropriations legislation. As a result, on the morning of 9/11, there were several million dollars worth of these huge boxes parked in a warehouse somewhere. In the aftermath of that day, however, these practical limitations did not deter Congress from mandating that the TSA deploy them throughout the 450 airports in the United States. The devices were far from perfect and not even the only option for explosive detectionsophisticated detectors that could pick up trace explosives residue and manual bag checks were among other possibilities in the mix, but what mattered to the powers that be was that they were a known step up in security capability. After this Congressional mandate, George Zarur and the legacy FAA explosives team along with DOT officials and their Senior Advisers were tasked with fixing the imperfect technical legacy of Lockerbie. Originally, CT machines were designed to sit in an antiseptic room at a hospital and process patients ushered into the dedicated imaging room, maybe one or two an hour. But George needed machines that were consistently capable of checking 300 to 400 bags in an hour in a much more stressful environment. This wasnt just a matter of speeding up the conveyor belt, but figuring out how these massive but surprisingly delicate machines could operate within the bowels of an airport loading area during, say, the brutal humidity of a Florida summer. When George started on the project, one of the models certified for its brilliant imagery would run for five minutes and then keel over, even in good conditions. Both L3 and Invisions machines would have to be significantly toughened up. Baggage backups meant delayed or even canceled flights. One of the reasons that these boxes weigh so much, use so much energy, and are prone to breakdowns is that at the heart of a CT machine sits a massive mechanism that seems like a relic of the factory-driven industry of

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