Originally Posted by
FlyingEgghead
Say you have a boarding pass but your itinerary has gone sideways and you'd rather handle it with agents in the airline lounge than at the check-in counter. Can you still get through the TSA checkpoint? Does the TSO or their barcode machine know or care whether it's possible for you to make your currently ticketed flight? E.g., if it's been canceled by the airline or you're misconnecting and will be asking for rebooking.
Another scenario is if the flight itself is delayed so you'll make it after all, even though it looks like you won't from the boarding pass.
Do you ever have to plead with a TSO in cases like this, or is it just a simple "same-day boarding pass" criterion and they don't look at the current time and current flight status?
As with anything TSA-related, there is the possibility on any given day that you may encounter a TSO with a unique interpretation of the rules, who may notice the flight time on your BP and disallow you because the BP is no longer valid.
As for a cancelled flight, as others have said, there's no realistic chance that the TDCs at any given checkpoint would know that, so unless they have the live link at the podium, they will only be looking at the name and date on the BP, and possibly (depending on the individual TSO) at the time.
The whole reason TSA checks the BPs against the IDs in the first place is that they were hugely embarrassed a few years ago when a young man was able to repeatedly gain access to the sterile area and stow away on various flights by using other peoples' discarded BPs, some of which were for flights on other days, some of which were for flights on the same day that had already departed. He was screened, of course, and so posed no threat to the aircraft or facilities, but the public panic over the idea of someone gaining access to the sterile area using an invalid BP that didn't even belong to him prompted TSA to start the whole "ID matters" stuff; now they check BP validity and match it to an ID.
So if a BP is expired, i.e. the flight has already departed, then it's not technically valid any more, and if a TSO notices, it is remotely possible that you may not be given access to the sterile area until you produce a valid BP which matches your ID. From the responses above, it sounds like it's not currently a problem, but be aware that it is theoretically a problem, and be ready to deal with it if it manifests (i.e. don't panic, just go to ticketing and rebook to get a valid BP).