I'm rather sceptical the MacDonald Humfrey MACH-SmartLane stuff, this is the driven rollers as we have in T5 - where everything has to go in a tub, rather than belts and manual rollers - where a carry-on can go through without being in a tub, is actually that good a system in practice.

They've tried to apply the same automated handling and process control techniques they use in the sortation and picking systems they normally develop to the security checkpoint, but the subtleties of the humans passing through the system I think increase the entropy of the system enough to bring it to grief.

I remember when they first introduced it in LCY. It was a fiasco, because there was nowhere to sit your bag still while you unpacked stuff that had to be taken out of the bag - laptop, liquids, etc. If you put it in a tray, it started rolling off toward the scanner before you had finished with it.

I honestly think the MACH-SmartLane stuff slows the system down and doesn't speed it up, because it assumes the users of the system are uniform, when they are anything but. I'd love to see it in a bakeoff against a more standard system.