For its part, the beleaguered federal agency – whose top official was removed this week due to scrutiny over questionable bonuses – has vowed to improve the situation with a 10-point plan to minimize wait times. It also has increased the use of bomb-sniffing dogs to help with security lines. But he is hiring more officers and moving bomb-detection dogs to large US airports.
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The big arrivals board at Pearson airport in Toronto indicated flights coming out of notoriously busy hubs like LaGuardia and JFK in NY, O’Hare in Chicago and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta were all running more or less on time Friday morning. Over Memorial Day weekend Mosher said 38 million people are expected to travel. “Secondly, the low gas prices”. The travel agency anticipates that more than 3.9 million Californians will get behind the wheel for the long weekend.
American and United airlines say they are spending $4 million each to bring in contract employees who can take over nonscreening chores such as handling bins and managing lines, freeing up TSA agents to focus on screening.
A TSA spokesman said the extra dogs would remain well beyond the holiday.
Long lines. Disgruntled passengers. Compared to travelers at other airports across the country however, Hobart said passengers departing from the Bay Area have been spared the worst of the security screening backlog. TSA officers warn that despite the airport security efforts, passengers must still arrive at least two to three hours earlier than their flights. The agency has installed a new management team in charge of screening operations at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport following an incident in which 450 passengers were stranded overnight because of long security lines.
A record number of people are hitting the road this Memorial Day Weekend.
TSA chief Peter Neffenger – under fire for how his agency has been handling those lines – pledged Wednesday to congressional lawmakers to alleviate the problem, specifically at hard-hit O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.
“I was anxious about it, but the lines moved quickly today”, said Kellie Artis of Alexandria, Virginia. The city’s aviation department projects Friday, May 27, to be the peak travel day, with 74,000 passengers passing through.
What makes it even more outrageous and unacceptable is that everybody who should have seen this coming – Congress, TSA and the airlines – not only ignored or couldn’t grasp the impending catastrophe, they made it worse. “At TSA, there’s a longtime tension between the primary mission of security and the secondary mission of supporting the free flow of commerce”, says Jennifer Grover, director of homeland security and justice at the Government Accountability Office.
When the program launched in 2013, TSA primarily relied on “word of mouth” to promote it, said Charles Carroll, senior vice president of identity services at MorphoTrust USA.
Words like “outrageous” and “unacceptable” get thrown around a lot in Washington for things that usually merit a lesser form of indignation, but the mess in airport security lines deserves all that and more.
“We were thinking it would be a really long wait and that we were late getting here”, the men said.
It was an experience shared with Kristan and Tim Witham. They got a nice surprise, a short line, moving quickly.
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Erin Baldassari covers transportation.
