How Animal Behavior Scientist Temple Grandin Would Fix Airport Security

Many travelers feel more like cattle than people when they fly for the holidays—and the TSA's new body imaging machines have added another irritating layer to the mix. Popular Mechanics spoke with Temple Grandin—a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University whose insights into animal behavior have led to redesigns of slaughterhouses that have made them both more efficient and more humane—to get some out-of-the-box ideas on how to make the process less intrusive.

Before we get started on the TSA's new body-scanning machines, I want to talk a little bit about the design of airport security in general, because it can be a stressful area for travelers.

Temple Grandin: One of the problems is that when airports were originally built, they were not designed for security. The newer airports are laid out a whole lot better. I fly all the time, and what frustrates me is you get in there and it's the morning rush7 o'clock in the morning on a Mondayand they don't have enough agents on staff and there's empty machines that aren't manned, and they've got a giant line there.

The other problem you have in these airports is that there's more than one checkpoint. But people who don't fly all the time don't even know there's another checkpoint, so they just go for that giant line. Airports need to be better at putting signs up and having employees there to direct people to the other checkpoint. LA's really bad on thatyou can go into LA and there's a giant line at one checkpoint, and then there's another one that's usually not busy.

These machines that the TSA has installed use two different methods to look past people's clothes to see if they're carrying any explosives or other dangerous objects. The whole idea makes a lot of people pretty uncomfortable.

I've been through those machinesthe grey round thing that looks like the Star Trek transporter and the black square thinga bunch of times. I don't have a problem with them myself. I don't know what the TSA can do, because the underpants bomber had it in his underwear. How about this? A beagle up on the table. As you go through and you put your luggage in the x-ray, he sniffs you. He's just at the right height to sniff at the right place. (Laughs) I don't think people would like that. That might get really weird at the airport.

Can you think of any alternatives to these machines?

One of the ways they could get away from these searches is if there were puffer machines that don't break. We had one at the Denver airport that was broken more than half the time. What a puffer machine does is it smells explosives. It blows air on you, and then the air goes over a sensor that picks up the explosives. The problem is that the sensor is very sensitive to dirt, and you're going to have dust in the air, and that eventually wrecks the sensor, so maintaining the sensor is hard. And I have an idea for how to make puffer machines work. I've done a lot of thinking about this.

[Ed note: Explosive trace-detection portal machines were discontinued in 2009 due to the cost of maintenance.

How would you fix them?

You know how your printer has a cartridge, and you pull out the cartridge and you recycle it, and you get a whole new cartridge, and all the mechanics are in the cartridge? To get rid of the maintenance problem on the puffer machines, what they need to do is have a cartridge where the sensitive parts that get dirty can be pulled out like a printer cartridge and sent back to the factory for reconditioning, and you just shove another cartridge into the machine. In other words: Don't ask the people at the TSA to repair complicated equipment. You don't repair your printer, do you?

There are some air ducts in the machine that will have to be cleaned occasionally, and then you have a maintenance contract on it to come in every six months and clean the air ducts. But that's not the part that breakswhat breaks is the sensor. We had the same problem with ammonia sensors in livestock buildings. We tried to make ammonia sensors for animal ventilation and they just broke all the time. You try to make a humidity sensor that's ruggedthey just break all the time. I got to thinking that the only way to make this work is you're going to have to have a cartridge you can just pull in and out every week.

And you think people would be more comfortable with the puffer machines?

Yes. All it does is blow air on you. Nobody ever complained about the puffer machine at the Denver airport.

The other thing that people are worried about is the privacy issuethat these scans are going to be saved, then distributed somehow.

Well, first of all, the face is blurredit doesn't have a face, but you can tell the size of the some parts. And I've seen the images of it, and it looks like metal sculpture.

Do you think if people could see the scans they're taking with these new machines, they would feel better?

I think people need to see thatand maybe even what the TSA ought to do is have a computer screen in the terminal that shows how a scan works and would play over and over again in the line where people can look at it. Travelers could look at it on an actual computer monitor and say, Ok, this is what the TSA inspector actually sees. I think that would help.

If a traveler refuses a scan, they have to be patted down by a TSA employee. Do you think there's anything officials can do to make people feel better about that process?

I actually saw them doing it to a lady just the other daythe whole big pat-downand the TSA employee that did it to this lady, she was really nice. I thought it was done very professionally. You hear all this stuff about rudeness and things like thatI have not seen it. They've been pretty nice to me. The lady explained what she was going to do.

So really, it's just about making sure the people know what's happening and that it's done in a respectful way.

I think TSA employees need to explain what they do before they put a hand in a sensitive place. I have found for the most part, in my experience with air travel, that most of the TSA staff's been very professional.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From Design