Long security lines at the airport? The TSA knows how to fix this

Thanksgiving is one of the busiest times at US airports and that means long security lines. The TSA even knows how to fix most of this, but the solution will take time just because the government is moving slowly, at least according to insiders in the TSA’s innovation department.

When you fly, you know that the bottleneck is the X-ray machine. They wait for the bags to slowly go through one by one. If your bag needs special attention, that’s another bottleneck, but it’s the x-ray you’re waiting for. An agent stares at the screen, trying to determine if your bag is safe to pass through.

In modern times it doesn’t have to be that way. The video image can be viewed by people who are far away. They could have as many remote workers as they can afford and clear the bags as quickly as they can roll down the line if they have the staffing. A special test must still be carried out on site.

You can have so many staff because the flow of passengers ebbs and flows differently at each terminal and at each airport. At one airport there is a huge queue, at another the agents are standing idle. However, this demand is no surprise – they have a pretty good idea of ​​which flights are flying and how many there are of each. You know how many people will pass which security check and when. They know a lot about you, as you’ve seen if you’ve tried one of the new facial recognition checkpoints that make ID checks easier for you.

According to J. Matt Gilkeson, TSA CTO and former director of its innovation task force, it simply takes a lot of time to complete the process at TSA or any other government agency, especially with such major changes. It’s not for lack of interest in developing new ideas and improving the travel experience. I spoke with Gilkeson at a technology conference in early 2024. He couldn’t provide any timelines for when this technology might be available, or guarantee that it will even be the case.

Modern devices are no longer conventional X-ray machines either. Newer machines use CT scanning technology, not all that different from hospitals, to get a 3D image of the bags and measure the density of the materials, allowing them to tell the difference between water and a potentially liquid explosive. However, in the future, AI technology that can analyze these images and detect both threats and safe items is desirable. After all, almost every bag and almost everything in it has been examined many times by a scanner and by an agent, often recently while on a return flight. They know who you are and could access the scan of your bag from yesterday to see if anything has changed or everything has already been approved as safe. This allows more of the work to be done by machines, speeding up the process for passengers.

The different time zones in the USA can also be helpful. While California is busy, New York could be quiet at midday, and agents in one location could be helping those in another. Ideally, you want to keep agents close by and even at the same airport to reduce the risk of communication breakdowns. However, in the worst case, such failures will only lead back to the lines we have today.

We’ve seen air travel become a major problem over the past few decades, with airlines advising passengers to be at the airport hours before routine fights. This is generally not necessary, but if you don’t have elite status, many worry about the worst-case scenario of missing your flight. In California, the high-speed rail authority claims that the estimated three-hour trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles will be competitive with the one-hour flight because of the extra time that air travel entails, but that extra time is a self-inflicted wound that this technology could do a lot against do.

One speedup that the TSA has nothing to do with is the Clear line bypass service. Clear members pay a fee to get to the front of the line, but still have to go through the regular TSA process once they get there. Clear was originally launched to promote new security scanning/sniffing devices to screen passengers more quickly. The machines were too expensive to provide for everyone, but the idea was that if paying members paid for the machines, overall throughput would speed up for everyone – but a lot more for those who paid. That didn’t work, but now Clear is paying the airport authority to let its members bypass the TSA line. The airport, not the TSA, manages this line up to the ID check. Clear also handles ID confirmation. The paying members (I have a free membership) subsidize other airport costs in exchange for this perk.

It would be more interesting to see a system for scheduling appointments through security. These days it doesn’t matter when you arrive at the gate, but rather when you clear security – the route to the gate is pretty predictable after that, but the queue isn’t. Because they know who is coming when, appointments could provide predictability for some customers. Until then, Clear membership and TSE Pre-Check status ensure that the process remains quick and therefore predictable.

The long operating time is sometimes due to the fault of the passengers. On a recent international visit to SFO, I noticed a huge line – easily hours long – for passport control for US citizens. Oddly enough, the line was fairly reasonable for people who had downloaded the Border Patrol’s Passport Patrol mobile app or had the much harder-to-get Global Entry status or Nexus card. The bad news is that cell service is blocked in most customs halls, although they could remedy this by setting up a WiFi that allows downloading their app and nothing else. Nevertheless, air travel could one day become a quick process again.