GUWonder

Half a million a day. Typo, shouldn't have typed a year when it's a day.

IATA has c 4.3k international US flights noted for daily average, with c 560k passengers on board daily.

wco81

Do these scanners actually depend on TSA employees watching each and every bag or do they have some kind of image-recognition and machine vision to flag suspicious items automatically for the agents?

With all the money being poured into development of MV and AI for image recognition in such applications as self-driving cars, it should be possible to leverage that towards airport security technology.

milepig

Is there new news or just a slow news day? Chicago local NBC news just led with a sort of fearful "total ban of laptops from planes coming at any moment" teaser.

And now on NBC national news.

RobertS975

Almost all international flight crew members travel with laptops or tablets. What happens to them? Also banned?

petaluma1

susiesan

If I can't take my camera on vacation to an international destination then I will not go.
I doubt it will get to that, no electronics at all. That would be a death blow to air travel.

wco81

What happens when these new generation of scanners are installed?

DHS is going to waive the ban for those airports which have installed the new equipment?

Or are they just going to maintain the ban until most or all of the major airports in the world have made the capital expenditures and investment in training to get the more capable scanners up and running?

84fiero

We would scale back or change our plans. Many trips the wife and I take have heavy photography centric parts. I think a total ban on electronics would be so extreme that even the most security-subserviant members of the public would be up in arms. Surely DHS wouldn't be that stupid I hope?

sbrower

New app. PhotoBNB. You go to another country and rent someone else's amazing photography equipment. Or someone else's crap. You choose the price, just like AirBNB.

artemis

I could almost see that working. The wrinkle is that DSLRs and mirrorless camera bodies have a large number of settings that need to be customized for the camera to work optimally for different photographers. That would be a major pain!

rpjs

How do you access the appif you can't take your phone?

artemis

DHS, though, keeps hinting that the ban will apply to all international flights, though, not just Europe and the Middle East.

exerda

I've also seen some folks with too much money and not enough common sense absolutely abuse high-quality camera gear they'd rented. (Hope they had really good insurance on it!) Don't get me started on the lady who said "she wanted the best gear, so she could take professional shots" and who had rented something like $20k of stuff which she couldn't even figure out how to use...

I also don't know that rental or AirB&B-style private rentals would necessarily cover all the specialized gear. I bet it would be hard to find a tilt-shift lens near a lot of places I've traveled and used one; likewise, although I suppose I could find a 500mm or 600mm telephoto in places with a lot of wildlife, I doubt the supply is such to meet demand should everyone have to rent locally (nor would it likely grow quickly, even in response to a ban; recouping that $11k investment takes a lot of rentals...).

Canarsie

Sure — if a person does not mind suddenly spending significantly more money per trip to rent camera equipment with no added benefit than what one has currently when traveling with his or her own gear.

The potential financial aspect of this issue would be a higher priority for many travelers than the wrinkle of a large number of customized camera settings, in my opinion.

GrayAnderson

The way I'm reading this, we're looking at one of two scenarios:
(1) They're not that stupid. The chatter on either a total electronics ban or a larger-than-a-phone ban (with the natural shouting match over where the line between a phone and a tablet is) is aimed at ensuring there's a sigh of relief in the face of a partial climbdown rather than a lynch mob at a partial ban. "Managing expectations" is the name of the game.
(2) They are that stupid. I tend to suspect that Europe will probably reject a solution approaching a total ban, and there's likely to be hell to pay in some other cases.

I will say, with due disrespect to Mr. Munoz, that now would be a very good time for the airlines to start drawing a bold line under fifteen years of documented bumbling, failed red team tests, etc., and saying something to the effect of "Look, we'd love to back you up, but until the TSA gets their house in order and their head out of their hindquarters on a whole bunch of fronts, we really can't."