I'm sure you've seen the stories about TSAs Pre-Check program, which is predicated on the concept of “risk-based security” (RBS), and dedicated to the proposition that if TSA can clear you before you fly, it won't be such a hassle when you show up at the airport to get on board. On the face of it, it's a good idea, and happens to coincide with my own theory that instead of spending a lot of money on more new technology, it might be better spent doubling or tripling the intelligence budget so we can identify the bad guys three weeks before they ever come near the airport.
It also happens to match IATA’s longer-term concept of Checkpoint of the Future, in which all travelers, based on considerably enhanced intelligence gathering, would be separated into three lines: known travelers (fast lane); known persons of questionable repute (high-security), and everybody else (that's you), in whose lane everything stays pretty much the same as it is now. Irritating. Pre-Check would have you pay a fee for the government to do a background check and certify that you are a good guy who gets to move to the fast lane. And that's where TSA’s numbers need to be a bit better understood.
I was present at a meeting of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee when TSA leadership claimed it wants 50 percent to 75 percent of all passengers shifted to the Pre-Check lanes, leaving the balance requiring the more intense screening. In the opinion of many, that may not be doable, but it depends on how you count noses.
Consider the numbers: U.S. airports have over 600 million enplanements, which includes round-trips and the frequent flyers with many individual enplanements. That’s an average of 1.6M a day, all of whom have to go through a checkpoint. I have never seen any reliable statistics that suggest the average daily mix of frequent business and infrequent personal travelers, but for the sake of this discussion, let's assume 50/50. Fifty percent of all passengers is not 50% of the flying public; by definition, the frequent flyer may account for 15 or 20 annual trips versus a family’s single vacation trip to Disneyland. A 20:1 ratio works very much in TSA's favor, and feeds directly into the IATA three-lane checkpoint concept.
Other factors mitigate somewhat the ability to implement Pre-Check rapidly, not the least of which is the background clearance process. As most airports are painfully aware, there is currently a long-standing problem in which even the airports themselves are having exceedingly lengthy delays in clearing their own employees. Another is that in spite of the vision of huge airports like Chicago and Atlanta with two dozen checkpoint lanes, in the full range of U.S. airports the average number of lanes is 4.2, not leaving a great deal of flexibility to accommodate any changes in design.
Nonetheless, this is one of the few times in recent years that I have been able to give TSA an atta-boy in moving toward the more reasonable prospect of risk-based security - the 83-year-old veteran and grandma in her wheelchair simply aren’t much of a threat.
