ICT in the Local Community :: ICT Essays

ICT in the Local Community Airports In airports, all public access is channelled through the terminal, where every person must walk through a metal detector and all items must go through an X-ray machine which then sends the picture to a monitor where a person can see what luggage you are carrying and if you are concealing any metal objects that may cause a threat to other passengers. All of the checked luggage goes through a large X-ray machine before it is loaded onto the aircraft. In the United States, most major airports have a computer tomography (CT) scanner. A CT scanner is a hollow tube that surrounds your bag. The X-ray mechanism revolves slowly around it, bombarding it with X-rays and recording the resulting data. The CT scanner uses all of this data to create a very detailed tomogram (slice) of the bag. The scanner is able to calculate the mass and density of individual objects in your bag based on this tomogram. If an object's mass/density falls within the range of a dangerous material, the CT scanner warns the operator of a potential hazardous object. CT scanners are slow compared to other types of baggage-scanning systems. Because of this, they are not used to check every bag. Instead, only bags that the computer flags as "suspicious" are checked. These flags are triggered by any anomaly that shows up in the reservation or check-in process. For example, if a person buys a one-way ticket and pays cash, this is considered atypical and could cause the computer to flag that person. When this happens, that person's checked bags are immediately sent through the CT scanner, which is usually located somewhere near the ticketing counter. A baggage-handling system makes all of the decisions about where a bag is going. Hundreds of computers keep track of the location of every bag, every traveller's itinerary and the schedules of all the planes. Computers control the conveyor junctions and switches in the DCV tracks to make sure each bag ends up exactly where it needs to go. The process begins when you check in and hand your bag to the agent. When you check in, the agent pulls up your itinerary on the computer and prints out one or more tags to attach to each of your pieces of luggage. The tag has all of your flight information on it, including your destination and any stopover cities, as well as a bar code that contains a ten-digit number. This number is unique to your luggage. All of the computers in the baggage-handling system can use this number to look up your itinerary.