TSA PreCheck lines grow
And frequent fliers aren’t happy about it.
It happened to Andy Lundberg when he was flying recently from Kansas City to Baltimore on Southwest Airlines. A Transportation Security Administration screener pointed him to the PreCheck line, where he waited behind a dozen other frequent travelers with the agency’s trusted traveler designation.
“There were two people in the regular line,” says Lundberg, a sales manager from Kansas City.
Lundberg’s scenario isn’t unique. Increasingly, travelers such as him who paid for their membership and submitted to a background check are finding that the fast lanes are actually slower than the non-PreCheck lines. And they’re wondering why they even bothered.
Merinda Edmonds, a photographer from St. Louis, recently flew with her mother from Sacramento to St. Louis. Edmonds has PreCheck status, her mother doesn’t. “She actually made it through security faster than I did,” Edmonds says.
TSA insists experiences like Edmonds’ and Lundberg’s are the exception rather than the rule. Virtually all passengers wait less than 30 minutes in standard checkpoint lines, and 99.6% of TSA PreCheck members waited less than 10 minutes in line, according to the agency. In other words, the fast lane is almost always faster.
Except when it isn’t. I had heard of this checkpoint inversion — slow is fast, fast is slow — but didn’t believe it until I arrived for a recent flight in Anchorage. The regular line had four or five passengers, while the PreCheck line was at least 20 passengers deep.
“Why is the PreCheck line so long?” I asked the TSA agent checking my boarding pass.
“Oh,” he shrugged. “They sometimes randomly give PreCheck status to passengers.”
In case you’re wondering, you want to be in that PreCheck line. There are no shoes to remove, no laptops to take out of the bag and best of all, no scanner to radiate your body.
What’s happening here? The TSA has different requirements for passengers in each line. For example, you can get PreCheck status by joining or by being a member of another trusted traveler program such as Global Entry, or you could get it by chance on the day of your departure. The “regular line” is for all others.
The result is a group of frustrated travelers who are used to getting what they want.
Passengers are fuming. Andra Watkins, a professional speaker and novelist, has noticed the longer PreCheck lines since midsummer. For her, it’s upsetting to see people who haven’t paid the TSA a dime getting through security faster than her and the other frequent travelers, who went through a lengthy application process and paid for the privilege of accessing the fast line. “The TSA needs to devote more resources and personnel to its PreCheck lanes,” she says.
That’s unlikely to happen. The TSA’s goal isn’t necessarily to make the process faster, but safer. In order to do that, it wants to collect as much information on travelers as possible. Travelers, meanwhile, will continue to pay for PreCheck because there’s a chance they’ll have a less invasive and faster screening experience.