Credit where it’s due
I’m not a big fan of heightened airport security. I’ve long been of the opinion that by far the strongest anti-hijacking measure is the post-9/11 expectation of passengers that their best chance of surviving a hijacking attempt is to fight back. Reinforcing cockpit doors and allowing pilots to carry weapons helps, too. Some degree of baggage and carry-on screening probably makes sense, especially to defend against efforts to merely destroy a plane rather than hijacking it, but I suspect we’re pretty far along the diminishing returns curve.
That being said, I think the front-line TSA is doing an excellent job of implementing the security measures their superiors have deemed necessary. I remember pre-9/11 security lines taking half an hour or more, and while lines are longer now and the screening procedures are more stringent, the amount of time it takes to clear security is now much less, often less than ten minutes.
It’s the little things that make the difference. The piles of big plastic trays replacing the little plates they used to hand you to put your keys in. The large counters to give you a chance to rearrange your stuff into the trays while waiting in line, so you don’t need to hold up the line when you get to the machine. The video loop explaining the procedures. The suggestion that you put your belt, keys, and wallet in your bag.
I took a trip last weekend out of SeaTac airport, which has recently implemented a new process improvement. When you get to the back of the line, a TSA employee asks you if you fly a lot, and if you say “yes” he directs you to the “Experienced Traveller” line. There are two lines, now, of roughly equal length. The Experienced Traveller line goes to two x-ray machines, and the other line goes to six x-ray machines, and despite equal population they move at about the same speed. If you fly enough to know how to get yourself through the checkpoint with a minimum of wasted effort, the TSA doesn’t waste its resources giving you handholding you don’t need. And if you do need more time because you haven’t got loading the trays down to an art, you get your own line with more resources devoted to it, and you don’t have to worry about holding up the line because everyone else in your line is holding it up, too.
I’ve studied queueing theory (the mathematical study of how to set up lines efficiently), and one of the basic principles of queueing theory is that unpredicatable variation is the bane of an efficient queue. If you know you have two classes of customers lining up, one of which is much faster to handle than the other, both classes of customers will get served faster if you split the single high-variability line into two low-variability lines. Kudos to the TSA for noticing this principle and putting it into practice.
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“I got on the short line once. It was for farm vehicles.”
Actually, I would love more of this. When I leave the baggage drop-off, I start the strip. If I’m flying casual, everything pocketable is in a single fanny pack, which comes off. If I have pockets, everything comes out into a plastic bag which then goes into the computer backpack. Belt, too. By the time I reach the checkpoint, shoes are untied, and computers are out of cases. (Yes, I often have to travel with two.) Grab three or four trays, and move out of the way. Place each computer in a tray, pop shoes into another, stack trays to make room, keep moving down the line. When I hit the belt, drop the backpack on first, then the shoes. Computers last, so they’re going through X-ray the same time I’m going through the detectors (not that I’m expecting a theft right under TSA’s noses, but there’s too much of my life and livelihood on those machines for me to take chances).
Walk through, don’t touch the sides, pick up my stuff. Slip shoes on, don’t tie them. Sling on backpack, grab computers, and find a distant chair to sit and reassemble.
Convenient? Depends who you ask: me, or the people behind me in line? I feel I owe it to them to take as little time in line as possible. I don’t expect the same out of them, because many of them are first-time passengers. But I want to do my part.
And don’t rush to be first on the plane, but don’t dawdle, either. Remember: we all take off and land at the same time as the last person on the plane. Dawdling can make everyone late; but so can rushing. If everyone crowds the gate waiting for their rows to be called, they block those people whose rows have been called. That means those people will board late. If your plane boards from the rear, that means they’ll be blocked in boarding by people who are seated in front of them. That means they’ll in turn block people farther up. Then the whole plane gets delayed, all because you wanted to be near the entrance when they called your row.
Relax. We all take off at the same time, and we all land at the same time. There’s no benefit in “winning the race” to board; but by trying to win, you lose, and so do all the rest of us.
There was a time I’d have said “you’re nuts” to anyone suggesting that the TSA was doing any kind of a competent job. That time has passed.
A couple of weeks ago I arrived at Dallas Love Field (DAL) at 0600 for an 0640 flight. That’s cutting it just a little close, even for Love field, but I wasn’t all that worried - until I got to the security line.
This was the first morning after the day American Airlines started canceling hundreds of flights due to some maintenance screwup. Quite a lot of their passengers had, apparently, been rerouted from DFW onto various flights out of DAL. The line for security had snaked all the way up to the ramp from the parking garages and curled back onto itself - about six or seven times longer than I’d ever seen it before (and there was a time I flew out of DAL every single week).
I knew I was going to miss my flight - there was just no way. I resigned myself to waiting in line anyway, just so I could tell the ticketing agent I’d eventually be talking to that I’d tried. So I amused myself by watching the faces of each new passenger fall when he or she came out of the skybridge from the parking garage and saw that monstrous line….
But then something amazing happened - the line was actually moving, and moving at a fairly decent clip! Long and short, I got through the line and actually onto the aircraft about ten minutes before we pulled away from the gate - on time, I might add. And, since I was driving back on my return trip and hence had packed a bunch of scary-looking stuff like an XM radio, a radar detector, and the coiled power leads for each into my carryon, I’d even had to submit to a manual bag check.
I don’t know how they did it, but I have to say that I was very pleased. And not only with TSA - despite the desperate straits we all seemed to be in, there was very little grumbling or complaining from anyone in line, and nothing but professional detachment and cool industriousness from the TSA folks. We all just did the best we could with the situation, and soldiered through it.
Rather an uplifting experience, actually.
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