Airport security: This body-scanning version presents a generic outline of a human, similar to a crime scene outline.
MANCHESTER - Administrators at the state's largest airport say they have been notified by federal officials that full-body scanners will soon be installed, possibly in time for the holiday season.
Manchester-Boston Regional Airport Assistant Airport Director J. Brian O'Neill said Thursday that airport administrators have confirmed what has been speculated for weeks - their facility has been chosen to receive at least one of 500 new advanced imaging technology scanners being deployed across the country in coming weeks.
"We have been notified by the TSA that we are on the list of airports chosen to receive full body scanners," said O'Neill.
"We don't have a specific date when they will be installed, but the announcement was for sometime this year. But we don't know exactly when they will arrive in Manchester,"he said.Over the summer a TSA spokesman stated that despite some news reports announcing the scanners would be coming to Manchester, the agency could not confirm that at the time because none of the 500 additional scanners had been purchased.
Once installed, TSA agents typically must complete 20 hours of classroom training and eight hours of on-the-job training before operating the scanners, according to TSA spokesman Sarah Horowitz.
The new scanners are expected to be of the next-generation type, which made their debut in late July in Tampa, not the ones that displayed what amounted to naked images of passengers as they passed through, although visible only to TSA agents.
This new version presents a generic outline of a human, similar to a crime scene outline, rather than an image of a specific individual.
By eliminating the image of an actual passenger and replacing it with a generic outline of a person, passengers are able to view the same outline that the TSA officer sees.
In the coming months, TSA plans to install the new software on every millimeter wave imaging technology unit now in place. The image cannot be stored, transmitted or printed, and is deleted immediately after a passenger is cleared. A privacy filter is applied to blur all images."
