Recent long security lines at airports are the fault of Congress and the Transportation Security Administration, not passengers and the airlines. This should go without saying, but some people seem determined to shift the blame.
One actually blamed passengers who bring “bottles of water, pocket knives and other prohibited items” for slow lines. But of course passengers oblivious to the rules have been boarding aircraft since the TSA was created. Surely the national IQ has not declined markedly during the past 15 years.
Other critics, including two Northeastern U.S. senators, are targeting the airlines’ policy of charging for checked baggage. They’ve urged the companies to waive the fees this summer, or dispense with them altogether. We think a waiver might be worth trying, too, so long as travelers are prepared for a bump in ticket prices. But baggage fees can hardly be the main culprit, either, since they’ve been in place for several years.
And as the trade group Airlines for America points out, security lines have been pretty bad at Chicago’s Midway, too, where flights are dominated by a single airline, Southwest, that doesn’t charge for checked bags.
So what is to be done? First, Congress needs to stop diverting airline ticket fees for deficit reduction — fees that are supposed to go to the TSA. And the agency needs to more effectively market its PreCheck program, which has not attracted nearly as many users as it should. More basically, the agency needs to rethink every aspect of its approach. For example, are those stacks of plastic bins that people routinely fumble with really the best option for the smooth flow of passengers? And what about the physical layout of security operations? Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner has introduced bills promoting pilot programs to experiment with new screening techniques and different layouts.
Security lines at Denver International Airport have required only modest waits every time we checked this week — a hopeful sign for the holiday weekend.
Even at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, where crawling lines forced thousands of passengers to miss flights in recent weeks, the TSA has recovered enough to recommend a two-hour cushion instead of three for travelers.
But the TSA is hardly out of the woods. In fact, this could be the lull before the storm given an expected record surge in summer travel and the fact that recent growth in passenger volume has outstripped the rate of increase in the agency’s workforce. This jarring reality prompted The Washington Postap to suggest, “No matter what the TSA does right now, if you’re planning to travel this summer, you might as well bring a copy of War and Peace to keep you company in the security line.”
It would be one thing if all the lost time and expenditure of $70 billion over the years — complete with high-tech body scans and dubious “behavior detection” training — actually worked as advertised. But in fact just last year special teams from Homeland Security were able to breach the screening process with weapons and explosives in 67 out of 70 tries.
If the screening is going to be ineffective, at the very least it should be fast.
