saizai

TSA claimed that "Priority lanes are managed by the airlines. We don’t regulate or endorse this practice." They've also claimed elsewhere that their area starts only at the travel document checker (TDC).

However, I've heard multiple reports of TSA agents managing the line pre-TDC, including eg deciding whether or not someone can take the priority / disabled lane.

Anyone have experience with this? Better yet, anyone have photo or video evidence?

A problem is that often the "airport" personnel checking BPs or priority status at the front of line are often dressed confusingly with actual TSA.

I think that most of my own experiences are that it's non-TSA contractors doing the front of line. I don't know if they're airport or airline staff, but in any case not TSO uniform. However, I'm not sure, and if others have experience w/ TSOs doing it, I'd like to know.

(See e.g. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/26913848-post11.html)

Randyk47

I don't recall TSA managing airline priority lines but then again the airports I frequent typically don't have airline priority lanes. Locally those seem to have disappeared about the time that TSA came up with PreCheck and CLEAR came into being. Not enough room to run a bunch of separate lanes. As I recall the few times I've come across that it's actually been airline or maybe airport employees managing those lanes but that's usually been at airports where a single airline is the only one for a concourse or set of gates with its own security point. Probably doesn't help that airline/airport employees often wear uniforms that may confused non-frequent flyers.

Section 107

The folks checking BPs at entry to screening lines are either airline contract employees or, to a lesser extent, airport contracted employees; very rarely are they actual employees of an airline or the airport (at least at major airports).

Sometimes TSA employees bark at pax-, er, "work" the lines prior to TDC in an effort to make everything work a little more efficiently - but nowadays this is pretty darn rare, too.

Most travelers do not know the difference between the various types of workers nor do they differentiate between the uniforms.

Randyk47

That's true. For conversation sake I didn't, and in actual practice don't, separate direct employees from contract employees. As a Federal senior program manager I had about 150 people working for me and probably half of those were contract employees. Outside of some regulatory and legal limitations they and their work was pretty seamlessly integrated into our mission and function. For the most part our end users were unaware who was a Federal employee and who was a contractor. I strived not to have an internal "us and them" situation nor to have the community we supported second guessing the technical advice and support they were getting. If my contractors weren't as good if not better than my Federal employees then I had a problem. It should be and was transparent to our "clients". While I couldn't use him as my deputy because he was a contractor the onsite contract manager worked for me for 12 years and knew as much if not more about the nitty gritty details than I did.