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Ever since 9/11, airport security lines have involved a hectic jockeying of which items can stay in your carry-on luggage, and which need to be pulled out – your Ziplock bag of liquids, your phone, your laptop, your Kindle – all while taking off shoes and cursing when you remember you didn’t dump the contents of your water bottle.
Well, help is on the way. The Transportation Security Administration will be installing updated scanners that let you keep more items in your bag, making the screening process faster, reported Travel + Leisure.
Looking like a globular cat scan machine – and in fact, the technology uses CT scanning – the device creates a 3D x-ray image of your bag’s contents and can rotate it across three axes to scrutinize what forbidden items you might be carrying. Sophisticated algorithms help detect explosives and other threatening material, and if a bag requires a closer look, a TSA officer can still inspect it. It's a big improvement from the 2D imaging that TSA currently uses.
TSA will order 469 of these base systems with one scanner, and 469 of the full-size CT systems which will include parallel screening lanes that will be fully automated with automatic bin return.
TSA is spending $781.2 million to procure and maintain these systems, and you may see these in place as early as this summer. This follows last year’s $198 million spent on mid-size CT x-ray systems that are already being installed across the country at various TSA checkpoints.
“Like existing CT technology used for checked baggage, the machines create such a clear picture of a bag’s contents that computers can automatically detect explosives, including liquids,” reports the TSA’s website page on Computed Tomography. So, laptops and liquids will soon be able to stay where you stowed them.