Although Italian airports are still finishing their test period with body scanners, the initial results have not been good considering the delays involved, the head of the Italian civil aviation authority said.

“We’ve tested all the body scanners out there with the goal of tightening up the time necessary, but the results haven’t been good because you need a lot more time than you do with normal inspections,” said Vito Riggio, president of ENAC, the Italian aviation authority.

Body scanners became a major issue for European airports this year after the so-called “underwear bomber” from Nigeria slipped through Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport on his way to Detroit on Christmas Day.

While Riggio made his comments in the course of a news conference on air traffic in Italy, ENAC later clarified that no decision had been made to drop scanners just yet.

The authority said that a meeting of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Air Transport and Airports would be held in the second half of October to evaluate the utility of the body scanners.

Tests with full-body scanners have already been carried out in airports in Rome, Milan and Venice, and will continue in  Palermo until the end of September.

Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport alone has more than 35 million passengers a year, making it one of the busiest in Europe.