Mom went through a magnetometer the other day at the airport. She
happens to have a big titanium plate and screws in her arm. Did the
buzzer go off? Nope. Puzzled, she told the security person about the
plate and asked why the detector didn't detect this large metal object
in her body. The security person said "Just move along."
Its rather obvious that titanium is not a magnetic metal, so it is
undetectable by a magnetometer. It's also obvious that it is a rather
useful material to use in the manufacture of weapons: knives, clubs,
even firearms.... and airport magnetometers cannot detect them.
Think about this for a minute. This means that the only real means of
ensuring that passengers are not armed is to strip and cavity search
every airline passenger.
Think about the implications: since it is therefore impossible to
prevent all passengers from being armed unless we choose to live in a
big brother police state, we MUST have armed people on every flight.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:52 MDT