WASHINGTON — There are the lines, the scanners and the occasional need for a stranger to poke around in your luggage, but the No. 1 complaint passengers have with airport security is about removing their shoes. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday that eventually that requirement will be dropped.
“You’re going to see better technology over time” that will detect shoe bombs without running the shoes through the X-ray machine, she said.
But Napolitano wasn’t able to say when new technology would come into use, and she said restrictions on liquids are likely to continue.
“In terms of what we see coming in the months and years ahead, it will probably be easier . . . to deal with the shoe issue before we can lift restrictions on liquids,” she said at a breakfast hosted by Politico.
Transportation Security Administration officials have said that passengers who register for a trusted-traveler program they are developing may be allowed to skip the shoe screening sooner than the general public.
Napolitano said restrictions on liquids are likely to continue in part because intelligence reports suggest that terrorists are still trying to use nonmetallic detonation devices aboard commercial airliners operating in the United States and Europe.
At some point, when technology is developed to ensure that everyone’s shoes are bomb-free, TSA expects to drop the shoe-removal requirement.
Overall, however, John S. Pistole, the TSA administrator, has been moving the TSA toward a system that relies more on intelligence and passenger observation than technology.
That approach has been endorsed by independent experts on airline security.
