TSA Launches Experimental Screening Lines at ATL
Luciana Mangas May 25, 2016
With the summer season approaching and an increase in airport traffic, CNN reports that the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is launching an experiment at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) — the busiest in the world with over 100 million passengers a year.
This Wednesday, TSA officials showed CNN the new screening lines that will be implemented, aimed at speeding up the security procedure that has been angering people all over the country due to the long wait in lines.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced today that they are taking action in order to improve the system, by investing in more officers, more bomb-sniffing dogs and new technology. For example, bins with suspicious bags will automatically be rerouted to a separate conveyor belt to keep the lanes moving, and baggage bins will recirculate after they move through the security machine, saving staff time.
It is still not clear how much time the new security system will save, but according to Chad Wolf, a former TSA administrator, the biggest improvement will probably be in rerouting suspicious bags. The new equipment is similar to security systems already in use in London and Amsterdam.
However, a TSA spokesman says that this won’t fix the immediate problem of the long wait in security lines. Experts will compare both the traditional lines and the new screening system side by side, in order to gather and analyze data about the experiment.
TSA has also announced that they will start posting nearly up-to-the-minute wait times at the nation’s biggest airports on its My TSA app by the middle of next month.
[Photo: AP]
ATL lines are the worst currently in the nation is why it's being tested there. JFK or MIA don't have anywhere near the length of lines that ATL has.
Whilst ATL may have the biggest number of passengers in The World it also has The Biggest Number of Domestic Transit Passengers in The World..Who of course dont even go through TSA screening. Perhaps MIA or JFK would have been a better Test Situation.
"We're going to spend lots of time and countless dollars implementing this test system. We don't how much time it will save, or if it will, but maybe it might help. We'll have a team of experts in-house to analyze the data and maybe see if anything happened " That's basically what I got from this.