3 Firms Win Airport X-Ray Machine Pacts

The Federal Aviation Administration awarded contracts valued at up to $120 million to three companies for advanced airport X-ray security machines. The companies are PerkinElmer Instruments in Long Beach, a unit of PerkinElmer Inc.; Rapiscan Security Products Inc. in Hawthorne; and Heimann Systems of Pine Brook, N.J. The new “threat image projection” machines not only spot actual weapons, they also randomly project digital images of different weapons onto the X-ray displays of real luggage to test screeners’ abilities to detect guns, knives, bombs and other weapons, the U.S. Department of Transportation said. Over the next three years, the FAA plans to replace X-ray machines at every airport-security checkpoint nationwide with about 1,200 of the new machines, DOT said.