As future threats emerge, one can imagine attacks on the air handling equipment in either a transportation terminal or in the transportation vehicle. One concept of operations might involve the use of less sophisticated triggering detection devices that would provide immediate emergency rerouting or cessation of air movement and that would then activate the environmental monitoring MS device to identify the species that created the event.

This class of instruments is less well defined than the instruments discussed above and is only at the concept stage. For environmental monitoring, MS operation would feature a data path to a central control point and/or feed-forward warnings to checkpoints or other strategic posts to facilitate airport shutdown and evacuation. This is a scenario in which the false alarm rate must be very low, so that the performance of this mass spectrometer would have to be well established. If biological threats are to be considered, one could expect this device to be two or three times as expensive as the instruments described above owing to the added expense of sample collection and preparation.

In a large urban airport, 5 to 10 instruments might be required, depending on how much remote sampling could be utilized.

Finding 3: The many trace detection tasks that can be envisioned in airports will require MS-based detection systems with various levels of cost and performance; in some cases, years of R&D and testing may be required to produce MS instruments with the necessary specifications.

Technology development schedules depend strongly on government involvement, and the instrument costs and deployment times mentioned here are based on the committee’s best judgment of the difficulty of the detection task and practical issues associated with producing high-quality, field-usable instruments.

Recommendation 3: If TSA wishes to improve its trace detection capabilities, it should deploy MS-based detectors in a phased fashion, with successive generations of instruments addressing lower quantities of an expanded list of threat materials and more sophisticated security tasks. These tasks range from passenger screening at checkpoints to monitoring of the air handling system.

In conclusion, this report has examined the potential of one promising technology—mass spectrometry—to improve trace detection capabilities of explosives as well as chemical and biological threat agents in the aviation environment. Here, the committee has offered just one plausible scenario for deployment of MS systems. Subsequent committee reports will examine additional technologies and defensive strategies for addressing a wide range of terrorist threats.

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Executive Summary (1-8)

1 Background and Overview (9-14)

2 Mass Spectrometry for Trace Detection of Threat Agents (15-28)

3 Strategy for Improving Trace Detection Capabilities (29-32)

Appendix A: Estimation of the Informing Power of an Ion Mobility Spectrometer (33-38)

Appendix B: Biographies of Committee Members (39-42)