If A Bomb Hidden In Luggage Goes Off, The Container Absorbs Blast

One of the biggest concerns in airline safety is the possibility of a bomb being hidden in the luggage that goes A southern California company, Telair International, has designed a new kind of cargo container that is the first of its kind to pass the FAA's blast resistant container test and be fully certified for use.

If a bomb hidden in a piece of luggage goes off, the force of the blast, and the resulting fire is confined to the container. 

Dennis Staver, Telair's VP and General Manager, says, "The material in the panels themselves actually expand with the force of the blast, and contain it, much like a big balloon. So it expands briefly, then it contracts back to its normal size."

This is the first container of its kind to successfully pass the FAA's blast resistant container test and be fully certified for airline use. The new container is fully compatible with existing aircraft loading systems, and is already in production. It's expected that they'll start appearing on aircraft soon.

Contrary to its technical description, the Telair HULD is not a hard paneled container. It uses a patented configuration of KEVLAR brand fiber materials developed in association with DuPont and incorporates these with innovative design techniques that are unique to the industry. The result is a lighter weight baggage container using flexible, high-strength composite panels to absorb and deflect explosive forces.

The unit is extremely rugged and resistant to external impacts, water intrusion and ultra-violet degradation. The materials used also surpass Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) 25 flammability standards.

Just how the container is supposed to "expand briefly" without knocking the bulkheads or walls out of the cargo area, will be a problem for the loaders to deal with. In video, the cube-shaped test container became momentarily spheroid as the blast went off; it then resumed its cube shape.

How it could do this, inside a confined space such as a cargo hold, was not immediately obvious. The fact that the container did indeed contain what looked to be a substantial blast, though, gives one hope that there may be some good fallout from this development work. Interestingly, the tests on the blast-containing technology were performed in August of last year (before September 11). 

Telair is a cargo-handling equipment company, and has also pioneered recent security technology, such as strengthened cockpit doors.

FMI: www.telair.com