Bangkok airport officials say insufficient voltage killed their baggage scanners

Bangkok (Thailand) – Officials at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport are now blaming insufficient voltage for disabling the airport’s baggage scanners. Admiral Bannawit Ken-grian, an advisor to the chairman of Airports of Thailand, says ten scanners were damaged by a “discontinuous” voltage supply.

The voltage supply has damaged the X-ray radiators inside of six of the ten computer tomography x-ray (CTX) scanners built by GE InVision. The other four scanners supposedly don’t scan correctly even after several reboots.

Airport officials originally blamed the failures for a computer virus that was loaded into the computers that managed the scanners – something that would not be covered under warranty. Conveniently, voltage problems are covered by the warranty and GE is flying out technicians to fix the machines, on their own dime.

Sixteen CTX machines are still working at the airport and officials say there has been no delay of baggage screening or flights.