Bismarck Loses Body Scanner to Larger Airport - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

  They're coming to take it away.  A bigger airport is getting Bismarck's full body scanner.

Federal officials are taking scanners from small airports and sending them to large hubs that haven't yet upgraded their body scanners.  Congress set a June deadline for the old machines to be removed or updated after controversy erupted over bare images the older machines produce.  

"So it's disappointing for us.  We think that we're going to have to have people come a little earlier to the airport in order to get through the old metal detector, because if they have an alarm, then they're going to have to have a pat down, where the scanner could screen out a lot of anomalies like a hip replacement you know, type of thing in somebody's body," says Greg Haug, Manager, Bismarck Airport.

Smaller Category 3 airports -- with the good scanners -- like Bismarck, Minot and Grand Forks are all losing their machines.  Fargo gets to keep theirs.  When Bismarck reaches 250,000 passengers, it will then be a Category 2 airport -- and be required to have a body scanner.

That's only 14,000 more passengers.  

Airport officials say they'll hit that point within a year or two.  Bottom line, get to the airport earlier -- and expect more pat downs.