PJ Vogt

And so how do you get pulled into this?

That's a good story.

Are you allowed to say what national security applications?

I can't really talk about some of the things we were doing at that time.

But what happened is our national security personnel, they brought the FAA to us saying, hey, you need to look at this technology because we believe it could be used for what you're looking for.

Hmm.

Doug was joining a multi-decade cat and mouse game, a fight between the engineers who try to keep airplanes safe versus the criminal engineers who work on the side of mayhem.

The battle really takes off in the early 1960s, when hijackers begin to target airplanes for the first time.

They're mostly using guns, and so in the early 1970s, airports finally start adding metal detectors.

After the passengers place their carry-on bags into our x-ray device here for screening, why, the passenger himself walks through this metal detection device that's immediately adjacent to it.

And that...

The engineers of the 60s and 70s were trying to stop hijackers.

The typical hijacker threatened violence, but usually just wanted money or a flight to political asylum.

Give me what I want and I'll release the hostages.

In the 1980s, terrorists started to target airplanes.

Terrorists wanted to kill people.

Many were okay dying themselves, which made them a harder opponent to stop.

And technology seemed to be changing in a way that benefited terrorism.

the rising threat of plastic weapons, both new guns like the Glock that contain more plastic and less detectable metal than its predecessors, but also plastic explosives.

And so the government funded research into body scanners, machines that could see under your clothes, in case a metal detector one day wasn't good enough.