HERE is a maths question. If the number of people moving from point A to point B increases by 9%, and the number of gates they can pass through decreases by 10%, what happens to the time it takes for them to complete the process? On second thoughts, forget the maths. For airline passengers this summer, it is only important to know that it goes up. Way up.
This is essentially what has happened at America’s airports. In the past three years, the number of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners has declined from 47,147 to 42,525. Over the same time period, the number of passengers has risen from 643m a year to more than 700m.
Why cut the roster of screeners? According to a report from the Associated Press (AP), it is all due to a false assumption surrounding the TSA PreCheck programme. PreCheck allows its members to skip the long lines and move through a special lane without taking off their shoes or removing liquids from their bags. It was launched in 2012 and was supposed to enroll 25m flyers. Instead, just 9.3m have signed up. At the current pace, it will be four more years before the TSA hits its target.
PreCheck makes for a more efficient trip through security, but it is not exactly convenient. It costs $85 to register, and requires a trip to an airport for an interview. In a recent story entitled “Is TSA precheck still worth the money?,” Yahoo! Finance answered, “Maybe”. Signing up is a hassle and probably not worth it for infrequent travellers, it notes. Moreover, “some travellers have complained that TSA precheck is also inconsistent from airport to airport. Not every airport has the expedited queue, and at the airports that do, it’s not always available at every terminal.”
That unpredictability illustrates one way in which it has become a victim of its low enrollment. As the AP notes, the TSA faced a dilemma after the launch of PreCheck, with excessive security queues for most flyers and practically empty PreCheck lanes. In an effort to address the imbalance, some non-enrolled passengers started getting a PreCheck designation on their boarding passes if they had accrued enough miles with an airline or met a certain demographic profile. That, of course, struck paying members as unfair and diminished the incentive to join the programme.
It didn’t help when the TSA launched Managed Inclusion in 2013—a fancy name for allowing some ordinary passengers to use the PreCheck lane when the normal line got too long. That programme was scaled back last year after several embarrassing revelations, including an incident in which a convicted domestic terrorist was waved through without the normal security checks.
The consequences of the programme’s shortcomings have confounded thousands, if not millions, of travellers, who can be stuck in the country’s security lines for as long as 90 minutes. Many miss their flights as a result, including 6,800 American Airlines passengers during spring break week in mid-March, according to AP. Things will only get worse this summer, as airport traffic peaks and airlines urge passengers to arrive at least two hours before departure in order to avoid getting left in the terminal. American’s chief operating officer told the AP that the situation was “unacceptable” at most of the airline’s hubs, and that “based on what the TSA is telling us, there is no relief in sight."
The TSA is taking modest steps to address the crunch. It is relocating some sniffer-dog teams to the busiest airports so it can allow more non-members to use the PreCheck line. (Condemning poor flyers at the airports losing the canines to a longer wait, no doubt.) It is also training more screeners and handing non-security-related jobs to airport and airline employees to free up staff.
Things won’t improve significantly until more people start signing up for PreCheck. But according to a recent survey, a quarter of fliers have never heard of the service. The TSA should consider lowering the fees and streamlining the process for enrollment. But even in the absence of those changes, the rolls will likely begin to expand. The agency says it suspects that longer lines will encourage more people to embrace the programme. It seems intent on conducting a natural experiment to test the theory.
