At this year’s show, the organizers moved things around a bit and now have an expansive hangar for vendors instead of the tents used in previous years. They’ve also moved the food booths and other services closer to show center, making for less walking. However, as the 2013 U.S. Sport Aviation Expo opened in Sebring, Fla., on Thursday, the industry as a whole still isn’t finding healthy sales.

Sport Expo expects about 20,000 attendees at the Sebring show and it continues to be an important venue for some manufacturers who’ve been able to reliably mine sales leads from would-be customers who come to Florida ready to kick the tires one last time before pulling the sales trigger.

John Calla of Adventure Sport Aviation said “We had a buyer come down from Michigan just to see the airplane and make a final decision,” he continued “Some buyers just have to see it, and see it again and see it one more time and then they’ve got to have it,”  The Bristell is a low-wing design that claims the largest cabin size in the field. and the aircraft can accept up to 130 horsepower. That makes it quick, but it doesn’t quite provide the power-to-weight ratio of the reigning hotrod, CubCrafters’ popular Carbon Cub. CubCrafters told AVweb that it’s now rolling a new airplane out of the Yakima, Wash., factory about every four days, the strongest sales since 2008.

Meanwhile, Tecnam’s Tommy Grimes told us the company is going in the opposite direction pricewise with a new offering based on the Echo Lite. It will sell for about $75,000, Grimes said. Like everyone else, Grimes said, Tecnam is still searching for a potential price sweet spot and things a sub-$100,000 LSA is worth trying. As reported in our video, Tecnam was also showing off something some would-be LSA buyers will love: air conditioning in a light sport. The 23-pound FlyCool system fits into the tail section of a P2008 with a minimal weight and balance hit. It chills the cabin by about 20 degrees, a welcome capability for owners flying these airplane in the broiling southern tier states.

The Transportation Security Administration will remove airport body scanners that privacy advocates likened to strip searches after OSI Systems Inc. where unable to provide software to make passenger images less revealing.

TSA will end a $5 million contract with OSI’s Rapiscan unit for the software after Administrator John Pistole concluded the company couldn’t meet a congressional deadline to produce generic passenger images. 76  machines where removed from U.S. airports last year and the remaining 174 Rapiscan machines, are to shortly follow with the company absorbing the cost, said Karen Shelton Waters, the agency’s assistant administrator for acquisitions. The TSA will instead use 60 machines manufactured by L-3 Communications Holdings, the agency’s other supplier of body scanners. “It became clear to TSA they would be unable to meet our timeline,” Waters said. “As a result of that, we terminated the contract for the convenience of the government.”

Airline passengers were offended by the revealing images, including those of children and the elderly. The Washington- based Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the agency in July 2010 claiming the scanners violated privacy laws and has called use of the machines equivalent to a “physically invasive strip search.”

Sanders said the Rapiscan units did their job by screening 130 million passengers, and the agency wouldn’t have acted if not for the congressional mandate for privacy software.”We are not pulling them out because they haven’t been effective, and we are not pulling them out for safety reasons,” Sanders said. “We’re pulling them out because there’s a congressional mandate.”

OSI Systems is “pleased to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement with the TSA” that will involve moving the machines to other government agencies, L-3 scanning machines rely on millimeter-wave technology, which uses radio frequencies that can find both metallic and non-metallic items. Rapiscan’s machines are based on backscatter technology, which uses low-dose X-ray radiation to detect objects under a passenger’s clothes. Under pressure from privacy advocates and some members of Congress, the TSA moved its screens to separate rooms away from airport security checkpoints. Officials monitoring the scanner images alert agents if they see a possible risk.
The agency’s strategy for handling passenger traffic relies on the capability of L-3’s millimeter-wave machines to process passengers in about half the time as Rapiscan machines, Sanders said. TSA will be getting about 60 more L-3 scanners in January and February, he said.TSA is also planning to move some scanners from airports where they’re underutilized to busier airports, Sanders said. The agency plans to expand the PreCheck program, in which passengers share personal data before going to the airport in exchange for less-invasive screening that lets them keep their belts and shoes on.