2013 Survey: How Effective is the Transportation Security Administration?
 

Please click here for the article and poll results.
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Do you feel safe with the procedures currently in place at airport security checkpoints, such as when you remove your shoes from your feet or transporting your liquids in a bag with the capacity of one quart? Is the “barking” of orders from an agent of the Transportation Security Administration to passengers standing in line waiting to pass through an airport security checkpoint effective?

FlyerTalk — the largest Internet travel community in the world with a rich base of travel knowledge — has collaborated with Frequent Business Traveler magazine on a series of polls and surveys pertaining to air travel, restaurants, hotels, technology, safety and security. Frequent Business Traveler will provide the poll; FlyerTalk members — yes, you in particular — will provide the opinions.

This survey — active through September 10, 2013 — is about How Effective is the TSA? Many FlyerTalk members pass through hundreds of airport security checkpoints throughout the United States on a regular basis — and airport security checkpoints in the United States can potentially foster issues and situations which can drive you absolutely insane.

As with the poll and discussion last year, the primary purpose of this particular discussion is for you to opine, elaborate on your thoughts and relate your experiences pertaining to the effectiveness of the Transportation Security Administration as a frequent traveler.

There is one difference this year: you will have the option to subscribe to Frequent Business Traveler Weekly and a chance to win a piece of valuable airline memorabilia.

Results of this survey will be announced both on-line in the magazine and here on FlyerTalk.

So — how effective is the TSA? Please complete the survey today and let everyone know your thoughts and experiences!

While the questions are fairly worded, I think some of the introductory material is a bit biased.

Admittedly, the TSA has taken steps to improve the process, including making its PreCheck trusted traveler program more widely available to flyers. Still, most if not all travelers have reported being frustrated by a security checkpoint experience at one time or another.

Reading this may put the reader in a particular mindset, making the survey biased.

I had a fabulous TSA experience in JFK on Wednesday. Quick service, polite and sense of humour. Through in minutes. Was really impressed. they Joked with daughter about her marvel t shirt.

Then trying to get into t5 at Heathrow from t3 it was awful- long queues to screen women, rude, short tempered etc etc . Usually in my experience the UK beats USA for time taken and service but not this week!

OMG this is going to be skewed bad. Most of the posters in here are TSA haters. You dont really expect to get a valid cross sectional representation do you?

And many are not TSA haters. Some started out as TSA-defenders and changed their opinion based on personal and family experiences. And some are (just as you probably are) very focused in their dissatisfaction - focused on those 'few' 'bad apples' who are abusive in performance of their duties or in their interactions with others and who negatively impact dozens of traveler's lives in just a single shift.

I would hope you are equally critical of pax-hating posters on the TSA Blog and other forums frequented by pax-hating TSOs.

'The opinions of a few do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of the majority of posters on this forum or at the airport'.

It seems to me that just about any article one reads, anywhere, that pertains to the TSA has overwhelmingly negative comments attached to it from readers, so I'm not sure where you think you will find anything different, other than perhaps an internal TSA sponsored poll?

The TSA has the very poor reputation it has among the American public in general because the TSA earned it.

Actually, the American public in general has a positive view of TSA. http://www.gallup.com/poll/156491/am...-negative.aspx

The cross-section of people you find on Flyertalk is not a representative sample of the American public.

And the cross-section of people who fly on airplanes is not a representative sample of the American public, either. Your point being?

People who don't fly on airplanes probably don't care about the TSA.

My point being that posting a survey on Flyertalk is going to result in very biased and misleading results.

Gallup poll is biased and misleading, IMHO.

Between 40-47% (67% of the over-65's) of the respondents haven't even flown in the past year.

I'd also credit the survey more if the poll indicated whether the respondents worked for TSA/at an airport, and even more particularly, if the respondents identified as having spent time in the military.

And public surveys don't give "I don't care" as an option. Or, at least, nobody seems to select it.

As others have noted here, people who don't fly on a regular basis think TSA is doing a great job, probably largely due to the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. On the other hand, people who do fly on a regular basis have a much harsher view of TSA. Yes, there's a "bias": those who have direct contact with TSA have a much more negative view of TSA than those who don't. Gee, I wonder why that might be?

Don't like the survey? Propose a different methodology for evaluating TSA that eliminate both those people with axes to grind and those people with no knowledge of TSA. I'm not sure that's even possible ...

Compared to what I see in places like India, I feel a whole lot better about the TSA! I had the same experience as Barnaby100 travelling from T3 to T5 in Heathrow earlier this year as well. Yuck...

Actually, they've done some degree of control for this. If you scroll down, you'll see responses by frequency of flight, and they're not materially different. For those who have flown at least 3x in the past year, Excellent/Good/Fair/Poor/Don't Know was 16/41/28/14/1, while it was 10/42/31/11/6 for those who hadn't flown, and 13/41/30/12/4 for the overall sample. So, the (somewhat) more frequent fliers were more likely to rate the TSA poor (14% vs 11%) than the non-flyers, but also more likely (16% vs 10%) to rate them excellent.

Overall, 57% of 3x or more flyers rated the TSA Excellent or Good, vs. 42% Fair or Poor, vs. 52% and 42%, respectively, for the non-flyers.

The really interesting thing is that the 18-29 year olds were both more positive about the TSA than older respondents (67% excellent or good vs. 45% for 65-plus), _and_ more likely to have flown (60% 1x or more, vs. 33% for the 65-plus). My hunch is that the younger generation doesn't remember how things used to be, and so the TSA is normal to them.

As to TSA and/or military, the poll is random (this is part of their overall phone opinion survey), so I'd expect roughly the same % chance as for the population as a whole (about 7-8% veterans, and a about 0.02% TSA employees).

Bottom line, this poll doesn't indicate that the flying public as a whole is materially more negative about the TSA than the non-flying public, and does indicate that younger people are _less_ negative than older people.

Again, the data we have don't support this conclusion.

I would not sum the results up as 'positive' - not when 'positive' is defined as 'excellent=14% + good=42' and offset by equally strong 'less than neutral' negative or trending negative numbers. Certainly if a review of my own job performance or my organization's performance came up with that kind of numbers, we wouldn't be calling them 'positive'. We'd be saying that within the margin of error (4%, IIRC), it's pretty much a wash.

Again, IIRC, that's the good news about the public perception of the agency's mission. As the sub-headline points out, TSA numbers are somewhat lower when it comes to the way these policies are actually handled and judged by people who experience them first hand (or form their opinions entirely on Youtube videos and news spots).

Yes, the poll provide the number of flyers vs. non-flyers (~40%). It doesn't provide poll results broken down along these numbers. Wouldn't you, as an employer, differentiate the opinions of clients who actually know you and use/experience your product vs. opinions of people who have no firsthand knowledge of you or your product? A significant percent (the majority, in fact) of people I know who dread TSA aren't social anarchists; they are people from all walks of life, good innocent Americans who deep down suspected that most problems at checkpoints were caused by someone 'copping an attitude' with an unprofessional, retaliatory screener. They believe this until one day they or someone in their family innocently falls afoul of the TSA - ie, until one day they actually go to an airport checkpoint.