After 9/11: Ten Years of Tech Made Airports Safer, Experts Say

September 8, 2011

By hijacking planes from U.S. airports on Sept. 11, 2001, and flying them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, terrorists killed thousands of innocent people and first responders and revealed an ugly truth: Our airports were not safe.

Today, thanks to a decade of American ingenuity and innovation, many of those security holes have been patched.

Airports are using new technologies, like refined X-ray backscatter equipment, which enables intimate searching of a passenger without the need for them to strip or be stripped by federal agents.