DeCosta said, “I like to describe it as doing heart surgery or a marathon runner while they are not laying down. So we have built two relatively large buildings under the roadways and we have 26 X-ray machines in very large rooms connected with five miles of new conveyor systems. It is basically for TSA workers and the thousands of bags that come through here every day. Every single one will get the explosives detection screening before it ends up on an aircraft. Right now, we do it the brute force, old-fashioned way. In the new way, it will all be automated, and from the passenger’s point-of-view, they will come in and drop their bag at the ticket counter – just like they used to before 9/11 – and be on their way.”

The City of Atlanta issued three contracts as part of its effort to automate the baggage screening process – Concourse E and North and South Terminals. Jervis B Webb won the Concourse E and North Terminal contracts, which it is working on simultaneously; they are worth $24 million and $28 million respectively. The virtual replacement of the baggage handling system in the North Terminal becomes operational later this year. Ken Hamel, Vice President of Airport Systems at Jervis B Webb, said, “It is a full inline system – the roadways were out of commission for a while, they built a couple of new basements we affectionately call ‘the box’, and in there is where this screening equipment will be located. The significant portion of this is it is really going to return the lobby back to passengers and it is going to make the screening process transparent to passengers.”