Yes, you're absolutely right.
Let me just offer a little perspective on the information that we received concerning delays after December 25. Five hours and thirty minutes was the longest delay in Canada; three hours was the average. In Europe our airlines were reporting that delays were about two hours per flight. Asia-Pacific was reporting roughly one hour of delay per flight.
Every metric that was reported to us was unequivocal: the longest delays in the world were here. We attribute that to lack of coordination between the two governments, those of the United States and Canada.
We certainly think that emergency events such as December 25 can be planned for, to the extent that you can do prior planning, prior coordination, establish lines of communication, and essentially develop playbooks and game plans. I think the situation demonstrates that such a type of prior coordination was not in place. Again, that's something that we would encourage both governments to work on, so that we don't have the same kinds of passenger delays.
You spoke about Mr. Sela's testimony, I believe, from a week or two ago. One of our concerns with whole-body imaging relates to passenger delays. There's the overall question: is this the correct tool to be finding next-generation threats? Clearly, we don't think that whole-body imaging is the correct tool for all categories of threats.
Two other items are also of concern to us as they impact the passengers.
The first is the passenger throughput through whole-body scanners. We believe it takes roughly 45 seconds—that may be a little too long, but it's something between 30 and 45 seconds—to scan each passenger. IATA has done studies that have unequivocally stated that from the curb to security screening, if you delay all passengers by 45 seconds, you can expect all flights to be delayed by between two and three hours. That is because, if you're the first passenger in line, you only have a 45-second delay, but if you're the 300th passenger in line, that delay ripples through. That's how we count the delays.
There's a second issue, which we haven't really seen discussed by anyone. If you install whole-body imaging, what effect does doing so have on the x-ray machines at the checkpoint? When you go through a whole-body imager, you have to take everything out of your pockets because anything you have in your pockets will obscure the image. All of that new material now has to go into the x-ray machines.
Has anyone thought about what is happening to the x-ray machines? Quite frankly, I think everyone's experience is that you're standing a long time in front of the x-ray machine waiting for people just to put the regular stuff through. Now you're going to have business cards, because you can't have business cards in your pocket; you can't have pencils in your pocket—all of that needs to go through now.
Hopefully I've answered your question, but those are our concerns about times and whole-body imaging.
