Airport Body Scanners and X-Ray machines?With all the new body scanners and ultra-detailed x-ray machines that are appearing at airports these days you have to wonder whether or not there may be an easier way to achieve the same thing. After all, what they are trying to do is find out whether the passengers are carrying something they are not supposed to be carrying. Bags and luggage are relatively easy to search as x-ray and sniffer machines are becoming more and more sensitive, but what about the passengers? What can we do to ensure that no-one tries to sneak a bomb - or more likely these days a bottle of hand lotion - on board? The most common way to try to sneak some sort of a device on board is underneath or inside the passenger's clothing, and the full body scanners that are being deployed at the more sensitive (and rich) airports are one way to approach the problem, but there is another far cheaper way to achieve the same solution... Fly nude! Ok, so it sounds a bit out-there as a solution, but think about it for a moment. No scanning system is ever going to be 100% secure, and so at best they provide a way for the airlines and governments to demonstrate that they are doing their best to reduce the risk. So at best we have a system which is - for example - 95% likely to detect a possible threat (not that 5% of planes have threats aboard, but that if there was a threat of some sort the system would be 95% likely to find it) at the moment, but terrorist technology is always changing and adapting, so this figure is always dropping. So which is the more scary? Flying on a plane with an unknown but ever increasing risk that one day someone will sneak a roll of high-tech det-cord on board woven into some item of underwear, or stripping off and showing your fellow passengers that you are carrying a few extra pounds? At most airports it would actually be pretty simple. Since many people never seem to be able to get past the idea of stripping off in public I wouldn't suggest making it mandatory for everyone, but you could always dedicate one set of gates and a part of the duty-free section as clothes-free flying only. Passengers would head into a changing area, strip and pack their clothes in a special bag which goes into storage until they disembark. They would then go through security nude and carrying their normal hand-luggage for a detailed scan. The clothed flights and non-clothed flights would each have their own security gates and hence their own queues. And I suspect that as people saw the much faster transit through the nude section compared to the clothed one the adoption of the new service would be surprisingly quick. This has to be the way forward. A low-tech solution to a high-tech problem. Lose the clothes and fly naked. Links:I was looking around when I wrote this article and as expected this is not a completely new idea. So far all the nude flights that have been offered have been for nudist holidays and passengers can only strip once they are on the plane, but the principle has been established! Links to a couple that I could find are www.naked-air.com and a Reuters article at uk.reuters.com/article/idUKL2975435320080129 and I'm sure there are many more!
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