San Francisco airport to pilot cargo screening system

San Francisco International Airport is set to become the first airport in the nation to screen all passenger cargo for explosives.
The Department of Homeland Security plans to launch the $30 million pilot program later this summer at SFO and then expand it to two other unannounced airports. Roughly half of the money will be spent at San Francisco.
“What we’re talking about is significantly increasing the number of items that are screened every day that are passing through this airport and go out across the country in the cargo realm,” Earl Morris of the Transportation Security Administration says. The ultimate goal is 100 percent cargo screening across the country, he adds.
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and several other national labs will help determine how best to use existing technology, some of which is already in place to screen checked baggage, to screen all cargo on passenger flights, The Contra Costa Times reports.
“The reality is we’re taking off our shoes and we’re pulling out our tweezers and other items. That’s great and that’s important and appropriate,” San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom told the newspaper. “But what lies underneath we haven’t been necessarily checking to the degree we should.”
Much of the cargo that rides on passenger flights in and out of SFO, which last year amounted to 530,000 metric tons, is already screened. Some cargo is prescreened by shippers, some is screened by the TSA, and some is spot checked at random. But Homeland Security is hoping for a system to screen every piece without causing flight delays.
“We’re going to try to increase the throughput by six times,” says John Kubricky of The Department of Homeland Security. “Cargo is the last thing to go on the plane. We don’t want to hold up the plane, so we need to speed it up.”
The solution likely will involve a number of current technologies such as CT scanners, analyzers that test for traces of explosives residue, canine teams and manual inspections. Livermore and other labs — Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national labs and Transportation Security Laboratory — will use simulations and computer models to determine how to best use those capabilities to handle 100 percent of the cargo.
The program could be fully operational at SFO as early as October, and within a year recommendations for cargo screening could go out to the other 447 federally regulated airports in the country.