Originally Posted by
exbayern
In one long thread there was a post from someone claiming to work for the company producing the AIT machines (an engineer, I believe). He said that TSA chose not to purchase the recommended maintenance package which the manufacturer can provide.
Eghads! Technology this new, and they're not buying into the maintenance contracts?!
From a cost-perspective, it would be interesting to see the operational requirements of AIT. Is there a minimum warm up time (
two hours to warm up, and the TSA only arrives one hour before the first departure? ski), cool down time, how do you calibrate the unit (
toss in two chicken breasts, one with skin, and one without?!), what's the response time of service personnel, is there an MTBF available, etc?
If they're going to use these things as heavily as they claim, either the technology is a lot simpler them I perceive to believe them to be, or their maintenance costs and/or down-times are going to be horrific.