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ST. GEORGE — With an increasing amount of passengers flying out of St. George in recent years, the St. George Regional Airport became a candidate to receive a new piece of screening equipment from the Transportation Security Administration — a full-body scanner.
“We’re really happy to have the body scanner here and installed at St. George,” TSA spokeswoman Lorie Dankers said Thursday.
Passengers from St. George are feeding into the aviation system across the country and beyond, Dankers said, and the body scanner provides “an additional layer of security.”
“It’s designed to detect metallic and non-metallic items that may be concealed under a passenger’s clothing,” Dankers said. “This is important because we know explosives remain the greatest threat against aviation, and explosives can be made out of a non-metallic substance.”
Officially known as Advanced Imaging Technology, the body scanner is the primary screening method utilized by the TSA.
Once an individual steps into the booth and is scanned, a generic outline of a human body appears on a screen in front of waiting TSA agents. If there is nothing found, a “CLEAR” pops onto the screen. If something is found, a yellow box appears in the general location where a suspect item was detected.
TSA agents do a localized pat-down of the area rather than a full-body pat-down in these cases, Dankers said.
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