Big Bear worked closely with Beumer Group and Heathrow Airport to design, develop and manufacture a new baggage scanning tray for Out of Gauge items.
Any item of luggage falling outside of typical suitcase dimensions are deemed to be “Out Of Gauge”, or “OOG”, so items such as sports equipment, baby buggies and umbrellas, or even very small items such as jewellery boxes would all need to be scanned on an OOG tray.
New regulations dictate that from 2018, all baggage trays which are used for security screening must comply with specific ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference) standards – this is to ensure that the trays do not interfere in any way with the hyper sensitive and ultra-sophisticated screening machines. Therefore the material specification for the trays was critical; the trays must be completely undetectable by the scanners, so that there should be no confusion that what is being seen by the machine operator is the item, and not the tray.
Heathrow is the first airport to commission these sophisticated new trays, which will be introduced over the summer period, and other airports are expected to follow swiftly in their footsteps as the new regulations take effect.
Big Bear worked closely with Beumer Group to understand Heathrow’s requirements, not only with regard to the material specification, but also the design, which has now been significantly upgraded and refined from the previous trays which were no longer suitable.
