At 5:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, Portland International Jetport (PWM) CCTV captured an image of hijacker Mohamed Atta Abdulaziz al-Omari on the secure side of the checkpoint.
Dressed in a blue, long-sleeved button-down shirt, the fuzzy screenshot of Atta and the superimposed date and time stamp are what dominate the screen, but if that’s all you see, then you’ve missed important TSA artifacts.
Notice the walk-through metal detector and the end of the X-ray tunnel at the top left corner? The one on which the man rested his elbow? It’s the same corner this contractor carefully guided while a forklift operator lifted the equipment into a specially made crate for preservation.
“When we consider an artifact or item for our collections, we look at its history and background, who used it and how it was used,” said former TSA Historian Heather Farley about the growing catalog of items housed in TSA’s archives.
Atta passed through the walk-through metal detector and his property advanced through the X-ray at PWM on September 11. He flew from PWM to Boston Logan International Airport where he and four accomplices hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 bound for Los Angeles approximately 15 minutes after takeoff, crashing it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:48 a.m.
The provenance of the machines can be traced back to Delta Air Lines, who owned the property and stored it after decommissioning. In 2005, the airline ceased operations at PWM, and before they vacated their airport space, Delta approached TSA with an offer to donate the equipment. The agency accepted, realizing the historical importance of the screening hardware. Documentation provided by the TSA Office of Property Management and the TSA Office of the Executive Secretariat verifies its journey from field to warehouse.
“All four of the machines came to us after the 9/11 investigations concluded and the airport (authority)/Delta wanted them preserved by TSA, so they’ve been sitting uncovered in the warehouse for the last 20 years,” said TSA Collections Manager Rochelle Safo. “The preservation of these particular machines is primarily because of their historical context and not necessarily the technology, since the knives and boxcutters the hijackers used were legal to bring onto an aircraft at the time.”
Montana’s Great Falls International Airport TSO Peter Mack joined TSA in 2016 after a career in law enforcement. He currently works at the Screening Partnership Program airport and reminds us, along with Safo, that the equipment didn’t lapse on September 11.
“The equipment at the time was basic, but it was functional,” said Mack. “The shortfall wasn’t in the equipment as much as it was what constituted a threat. At the time there wasn’t an FAA prohibition against blades shorter than four inches.”
Safo began photographing and measuring the dimensions of all of the equipment in TSA’s collection in 2023, and funding to crate the PWM artifacts in custom made, museum quality boxes was secured the next fiscal year.
The preservation effort is part of TSA's ongoing commitment to remembering its origins and honoring the work of previous generations of aviation security professionals.
“Preserving the TSA artifacts will serve much the same purpose as what preserving the Apollo spacecraft does for NASA,” said Mack. “The fact that screeners were able to identify threats with these old machines will give present day screeners more confidence in their current technology. The message from 9/11 shouldn’t be that the threat was too difficult to detect, but rather the threat we understood was not the threat that presented itself.”
By Karen Robicheaux, Strategic Communications & Public Affairs.