As 15 million people in the United States head to airports this holiday season — slightly fewer than last year — some travelers will find welcome changes to security screening procedures.
Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency
Travelers on Thanksgiving eve at Reagan National; quicker screening under PreCheck has been expanded.
The Transportation Security Administration has expanded its PreCheck trusted traveler program to 35 airports, allowing members who have been deemed low risk to keep shoes, jackets and belts on. Children 12 and under and passengers 75 and older also receive expedited screening at any checkpoint; pilots, flight attendants, members of the military and people with top secret security clearances qualify at some airports.
John S. Pistole, administrator of the T.S.A., said in an interview that the agency’s priority this year had been to move toward a risk-based approach to screening, recognizing that a large majority of travelers are not potential terrorists.
“When the agency was set up, it was focused almost exclusively on the security mission and not as much on the passenger experience,” Mr. Pistole said. “It became an adversarial relationship, so what we’re trying to do through all these initiatives is change that paradigm and make this a partnership.”
Even with these changes, the agency is under pressure to refine its strategy further in 2013. Its operations have been scrutinized by independent researchers, travel industry committees and government officials charged with oversight, and their ideas for reform are coalescing around a consistent theme.
“I use this acronym SEE,” said Stephen M. Lord, director of homeland security and justice issues for the Government Accountability Office, which has issued many lengthy reports about the T.S.A. “They need to make the process more selective, more effective and more efficient.”
More selective means “shrinking the haystack and really focusing on the dangerous people,” Mr. Lord said. While PreCheck and other expedited screening options are a step in that direction, only 7 percent of passengers qualify for these programs, a number Mr. Pistole said the agency was working to expand.
One option being tested is to use dogs that sniff for explosives in tandem with behavior detection officers to divert more people to PreCheck lanes. That process was used at Indianapolis International Airport the day before Thanksgiving, allowing nearly a third of passengers to have expedited screening.
Regarding effectiveness, Mr. Lord said, the T.S.A. needs to improve the technology it relies on — primarily expensive body scanners that may not detect explosives reliably. Although the test results are classified, lawmakers briefed on them have called them disappointing. The agency has acknowledged problems with the slow pace of its X-ray body scanners, removing many of the machines from larger airports in favor of millimeter wave scanners. These now number 655 units in use, in contrast to 170 X-ray machines.
Finally, becoming more efficient means addressing the time passengers spend waiting to get through security — a factor that the T.S.A. does not measure consistently or make public, but one of growing concern to the travel industry as passenger volume has stagnated.
“You can’t focus exclusively on security,” Mr. Lord said. “You’ve got to be mindful of customer service.”
It is difficult to assess how travelers truly feel about airport security. Still, a G.A.O. report released in November found that the T.S.A. did a poor job of tracking and handling customer complaints, a process Mr. Lord described as allowing officials to “essentially investigate themselves.” A separate G.A.O. study called for better performance assessments, particularly as a way to gauge whether airports that use private companies to handle screening, under federal supervision, score higher than airports that use T.S.A. employees.
Mr. Pistole said the agency was working to improve its relationship with passengers. It is training officers and supervisors to defuse escalating situations at checkpoints, appointing customer service staff at some airports and creating a way to send complaints that are not resolved locally to an ombudsman.
A Quest for Speedier and Smarter Airport Security
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A Quest for Speedier and Smarter Airport Security
