June 1, 1999
By LORRAINE NELSON
Lewiston Morning Tribune
CLARKSTON, Wash. (AP) -- An airport security device invented by a Clarkston company is now at the Federal Aviation Administration's technical center in Atlantic City, N.J.
It will be tested there and if all goes well, it will be shipped to Israel and put into use, according to Tex Yukl, majority owner of Spatial Dynamics in Clarkston.
"The advantages of this system is that it is very fast in comparison to other systems," Yukl said, "and it uses nonionizing, safe energy. It can find all the offending agents, including drugs, that many agencies are looking for and it's nonintrusive, so it doesn't strip anyone."
The FAA contracted with Spatial Dynamics in 1995 to come up with a device. It uses low-level microwave radiation to detect what a computer tells it to detect.
Two years ago, the company set it up at the Lewiston-Nez Perce County Airport and asked volunteers to walk through it so they could build a computer database of different body types. About 500 people did so.
"If it weren't for that year at the Nez Perce airport, we wouldn't have been here," Yukl said. "We have a lot of thank-yous to go out to those people who marched through this thing."
Yukl and his cohorts at Spatial Dynamics are microwave physicists and the company has several patented inventions.
They relocated from Oregon to the Port of Wilma near Clarkston in 1994 to be near the engineers at the universities in Pullman and Moscow.
Yukl said they just returned from Atlantic City, where they set up and demonstrated the device for independent contractors. They demonstrated it by looking for explosives, weapons and drugs.
"The exciting part is we also did some preliminary explosives testing on specific kinds of explosives that are very difficult for other technologies to find," Yukl said. "We had a 95 percent detection rate and a 3 percent false positive, which has everyone excited."
If and when the device is sent to Israel, the Spatial Dynamics crew also will go there for a month or more to help them set it up. Yukl is hoping production of the devices also will begin about that time for U.S. airports and other places that need such security.
Although Spatial Dynamics hasn't been involved in production of any of its inventions in the past, it may be interested in this one, depending on the availability of financing, he said.
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