The Man With X-ray Vision

So you want to be a screener? Well, you’d better have sharp vision, a keen attention span and patience. Lots of patience. Because somewhere in that endless parade of hastily packed carry-ons, there might be a gun, and it’s your job to catch it.

We’re not talking about the guy who runs the movie projector here. Screeners are the first line of defense in airport security, the folks who use X-ray vision to scan your luggage for inappropriate contents--bombs, for instance. And if anybody knows screening, it’s Bennie Gregory, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Screener of the Year.

The 63-year-old Argenbright Security worker heads up the crack team of 43 pre-board screeners who man the United Airlines checkpoint at Terminal 7 at LAX, through which 12,893,000 passengers walk each year. Not only has Gregory never missed a day of work since being hired in December 1996, he’s never once been duped by those wily undercover FAA agents who keep screeners on their toes by slipping simulated weapons into the mix.

While poking through other people’s dirty laundry all day may not sound like the most stimulating line of work, Gregory says protecting the public is its own reward. “The main thing is commitment,” says Gregory, who oversees about 120,000 screenings a day. “The next thing is to have good common sense and a lot of tolerance. We see people coming through who’ve been traveling for three days and they’ve been through the wringer. Our job is to move them through so they’re smiling and relaxed by the time they get on the plane.”

Carry-on contraband is rare, Gregory says. “Usually, if we find something, there’s been a mistake--like John Doe asked his wife to put his revolver in his suitcase, and she put it in his carry-on instead. The way the screening process is now, you’d have to be an idiot to do anything like that intentionally.”

And, for that matter, it’s not necessarily sinister terrorists who pose the screener’s biggest challenge. It’s body modification.

“Once there was this guy and his girlfriend,” says Gregory. “They had earrings, chains, you name it, and they were both wearing leather with all kinds of studs. I thought we’d never get them through the metal detector. It took about 20 minutes for each one.”