L-3's millimeter wave scanning technology tested at ten U.S. airports

Predator drones, self-destruct systems for wayward rockets, and hand-held land mine detectors. Sales of scanners at airports and other public facilities will not rival the military business but should show strong growth with Washington’s heightened focus on homeland security, say company executives.

In 1998, L-3 won U.S. government certification for its eXaminer scanner, manufactured in a nondescript business park on Bryan Dairy Road in Clearwater. About 900 of the machines, which use computed tomography (CT) to find explosives in checked airline luggage, have been sold worldwide. L-3 moved in 2003 to a new location with three acres of space at Gateway Business Park on Gandy Boulevard in St. Petersburg, just off Interstate 275. About 230 employees assemble and test eXaminer machines, X-rays for carry-on bags and cargo and millimeter wave body scanners.

The company has sold more than 100 of the body scanners, marketed under the name ProVision. They are in use at federal courthouses in northern Virginia and Colorado, the Green Zone in Baghdad, and two Israeli border checkpoints. Computer chip manufacturers scan employees to prevent theft. The biggest potential customer now is the TSA. Objections from groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) aside, the agency says travelers overwhelmingly prefer body scans to pat-down searches by officers.

The TSA has purchased 38 ProVision scanners at $170,000 each. L-3 has two competitors in the body scanner market, Rapiscan Systems of Torrance, California, and American Science & Engineering based in Billerica, Massachusetts. They use backscatter’ devices, selling for $100,000 a piece, which shoot low-power X-rays at travelers. Both technologies work basically the same way. X-rays or radio waves bounce off a solid object, like metal or plastic explosives, differently than off of skin. On an image generated by the machines, patches of oddly reflected rays or waves reveal what’s hidden beneath a traveler’s clothes.

The TSA will not discuss the pros and cons of the different machines while airport tests continue. Backscatter technology generates higher quality images, says Joshua Jabs, a security technology analyst for Roth Capital Partners LLC. How much the images reveal has become a major issue, he says, and AS&E and Rapiscan developed better filters that show weapons without revealing intimate physical details of the people being scanned (their images look like the dark outline of a body).

L-3’s machine, though, scans faster. Both backscatter machines require separate front and back scans of travelers. Antennas in the ProVision portal revolve around a subject to create a 3-D image in seconds. If the TSA wants to check large numbers of people selected randomly — not just passengers who first set off a metal detector or other alarm — L-3’s machine would have a big advantage. “As of now,” says Jabs, “L-3 stands to benefit more than the others.”