Airport of the Future

To see the future of airport security, rent the 1990 movie Total Recall. Watch as Arnold Schwarzenegger strides into a subway tunnel and is stripped down to his bones in a screening corridor. An X-ray machine projects his skeletal image onto a wide windowpane in an adjacent control room. A big, red, blinking, honking bull's-eye exposes a gun. The security of tomorrow won't be exactly what the movie, set in 2084, depicts. But life is beginning to imitate art.

A walk-through portal that verifies identity, frisks for weapons and sniffs for explosives in one smooth 10-second process could be on the market within 10 years. With further advancements and adequate funding, Transportation Security Administration chief technologist Chuck Burke says passengers one day will enter an airport and go directly to their flights with no delay, barely realizing they're submitting to security checks along the way: "You don't know what's happened, but you've just been screened."

Having plugged the most noticeable holes in commercial aviation security with more stringent inspection of passengers and luggage since Sept. 11, the government is broadening its focus. With industry, it is studying ways to make every aspect of an airport more secure-from perimeter gate to airplane door.

The illustration on the following pages depicts what may be happening at airports in 2010 and beyond to keep travelers safe and secure. This composite is based on information obtained from roughly two dozen government and industry sources. Many of the technologies are immature, and cost and privacy issues still must be resolved.

More than 600 million people fly within the United States and more than 1 billion checked bags pass through U.S. airports every year. Passenger totals are expected to nearly double within 10 years. "The technical challenge is to keep increasing that security and keep increasing that efficiency," says Andy Patrichuk, vice president of transportation and security solutions for Lockheed Martin. "If you start to choke the system," Patrichuk says, "you are impeding commerce, and that could also be a goal of the terrorist."

Checkpoints are choke points today, because airports were not designed and built with post-Sept. 11 security requirements in mind. The scarcity of space for big, bulky machines is pushing screening technology to become smaller, smarter and increasingly dependent on information data-bases. Passengers will walk through a security portal that examines their eyes, face, fingerprints, hand geometry, voice and signature for biometric identity. The same portal will be able to reduce a person to a holographic image or to sniff traces of explosives on clothing. One day, it may be able to dislodge flakes of skin and analyze DNA.

If this doesn't bring to mind Big Brother, then consider this: That portal will be networked by computers with every other airport data collection point nationwide to provide a complete picture of security-from the airplanes and the tarmac to the cargo and the passengers.

"We're talking about realms of possibility," says Tony Swansson, director of Boeing's airport security programs. "If you are going to have a system that works in the background, it is going to have to work on breakthrough technologies."