Peace of mind at an affordable price

at large-scale civilian industrial sites.

Thermal cameras are correspondingly effective for continuous surveillance at smaller-scale venues: mass-transit hubs, schools, hospitals, residences. The Secret Service employs FLIR thermal cameras to help protect the homes, persons, and privacy of government officials in the Washington, D.C. area. Thermal cameras also see service in protecting transportation infrastructure including bridges, tunnels, rail yards, and port facilities, but they are not confined to fixed-mounted applications. The cameras are no less effective on board a moving train, car, truck, or boat than in a static environment. “They aren’t X-Ray devices, so they won’t look through walls,” said Klink. “But when the security of a facility is a must, I would say thermal cameras are the monitors of choice. Starting at only about $3,000 apiece, they give the professional an affordable tool for finding and assessing threats to anything from a high-value residence to critical government infrastructure.”

FLIR produces thousands of thermal cameras each year in various configurations. They are available from the company’s Commercial Vision Systems Division with very short lead times, often directly from stock.

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Bill Klink of FLIR Systems made plain that he is not expert in the area of airport ground traffic control and has not observed widespread use of thermal cameras for this application. HSDW would hazard a guess that thermal imaging technology — which, in conjunction with ground surveillance radar, could give operators a clear picture of an otherwise complicated radar traffic display — holds promise for airport management. If so, the potential security benefit is very great. “Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground,” Mark V. Rosenker, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told the New York Times. “To me, this is the most dangerous aspect of flying.”

Reporting from Washington for the Times, Matthew L. Wald furnished recent examples of serious “runway incursions” in the United States. For the six-month period to 30 March, there were fifteen such events, compared with eight in that period a year earlier. Another occurred at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on 6 April when a tug operator pulling a Boeing 777 along a taxiway failed to stop at a runway as another plane was landing, missing the tug by about twenty-five feet. Wald wrote, “The last airliner crash in this country, a regional jet in Lexington, Kentucky, in August 2006, was a runway incursion: the crew tried to take off on the wrong runway.”