I recently had a young man do some yard work for me. When his father asked me he the work had been satisfatory, I told him that it had been and the best part was that his son stayed off his cell phone. Father responded with something to the effect of "I told him if he got on his cell phone while he was supposed to be working, I'd kill him!"

At your suggestion, I am just about to contact my reps to ask that they consider this suggestion.

What's the current turnover rate for TSA?

The answer to that question is SSI.

Travelers miss flights due to long, long lines at Nashville airport


Travelers reported security line wait times of up to three hours.

From the article:

"The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said they saw 4,000 more travelers than they do on a typical Wednesday, and it didn�t have the staff to handle the abrupt increase."

and

"�I�m about to miss my second flight of the day,� said traveler Claire Maldonado. �Someone described the security line like a Dr. Suess line; it never ended.�"

TSA puts blame on passengers as well:

"...TSA lines were weighed down by travelers who tried to go through security with prohibited items."

This is what happens when there are no rules and you never know what to expect when you get to the airport.

I wish a few TSOs would fly around the country once in a while and actually go through the same checkpoint process as the rest of us. Maybe then they'd stop blaming pax for not knowing what the unpublished rules are.

Just evidence that Whole Body Scanners do not and cannot process travelers as quickly as WTMD's but TSA insist on using the slowest, flawed technology available.

You miss the point. This has nothing to do with processing travelers quickly or even effectively.

This is about money.

The deliberately long slow lines will be used as leverage to get the money to double down on the number of NoSs and to hire more screeners.

Of course, none of that will change anything as long as we continue to see photos showing two closed TDC stands, one open, no Pre lane, and rafts of LTSOs and STSOs standing in little clusters, chatting and playing with their cellphones, while pax funnel through two open NoSs next to 8 closed lanes.

We'll put more dollars in the pockets of people like Chertoff and Neffenger (he's got to get his retirement payoffs lined up) and we'll increase the number of non-working LTSOs and STSOs standing around distracting the few screeners actually trying to work.

There may be a effort to create work slow downs and generate long lines in order to impact budget negotiations but the underlying issue is that TSA is doing the wrong things, and even then doing the wrong things poorly to secure civilian commercial aviation. Not even a job that government should be involved in.

There's clearly backroom maneuvering going on.

TSA is making it abundantly clear: the current situation is going to persist throughout the summer, so be prepared. That, as much as anything else, tells me that Neffenger is doing this deliberately. He wants these lines to persist for months, if not become the new norm. Yet the airlines haven't said a peep. Why not?

The top one is BS. The TSA has live tracking of the number of passengers originating and the number connecting through the airport on each flight, along with the time of the flight just so they can schedule the appropriate amount of staff.

The latter is an issue, and they should remove the right to use TSA Pre for 12 months on the first violation, and lifetime ban on the 2nd. Additionally for all of the other people that rarely fly, they should have video monitors looping what they should be doing as they are waiting in line. If you screw up and leave something in, then you go to the back of the line. This will do 2 things, speed up the flow instead of letting that person hold the line for 2-5 minutes while they try to correct the issue. 2nd it will provide a huge incentive to pay attention to what you are doing in security, and speed every else up as well.

???

1) Where did you get the idea that the poorly prepared pax causing delays are Pre pax?

2) There is no way for any pax, Pre or not, to adequately prepare for screening because there's no way to know the rules until you get to the checkpoint. Anyone who has ever carried an item through dozens of checkpoints (like a tiny bottle of prescription nitro pills or the drawcord from a lady's sweat pants) and then gotten it confiscated knows the experience can be completely unpredictable.

Who knew that the drawstring from a pair of women's sweats could be subject to confiscation?

3) When an airport has one lane out of six open and 2 hour waits in line, it might be time for a couple non-working LTSOs and STSOs to put down their cellphones and open up a new lane. That's the real cause of the delays - non-working staff, not insufficient numbers of staff.

Of course it's deliberate. Didn't Neffenger announce when he came on-board that they were going to be more thorough "for your security" regardless of how lng lines got? This document has one lovely paragraph that expresses some of their reasoning behind this issue:
This was also relevant:This implies (and I recall he said it at some point though I can't find the reference right now) that with changes will come longer wait times.

Strangely, this was not part of the above-linked report! I wnder why?!

I read this in the testimony as well. So, Neffy deliberately reduced the number of clerks assuming that everyone would jump on the ExtortionCheck bandwagon. And, he acted like he or his predecessors had not been briefed on incremental results of the covert testing. Now, he wants his money back so he can hire back the clerks. So, we get punished with three-hour lines because we didn't join ExtortionCheck and we get punished for a bizarre decision that would have gotten him fired as a Pizza Hut manager.

One other truth-biasing remark: His budget staff cranked out clerk numbers in support of FY 16 a year or so in advance, but, he left out that the president's budget isn't submitted until ~January of a given year. Neffy had plenty of time to revise his submittal.

One question for those of you who use ExtortionCheck: Are there really that many fewer clerks occupying space in an ExtortionCheck line versus a regular line?

I can't answer your question, but I can tell you that there are many complaints at AskTSA about lack of PreCheck and the number of clerks just standing around doing nothing. Examples:

The above are just from today.

There is also this little tidbit:

https://twitter.com/AskTSA/status/710801931762057217

How can the TSA be unprepared for the extra travelers? They would have all of the secure flight data for people flying that day. Spring break happens every year. The article said that they had 4,000 more people than normal. The TSA would have known that because I find it hard to believe the airlines are flying with that many empty seats regularly.

The article also said people were flying with prohibited items like oversized liquids, pocket knives, and scissors. That's an easy problem to solve. Relax the liquid restrictions so the regular size tube of toothpaste (that fits inside a quart bag anyway) is no longer prohibited. Allow pocket knives to be carried on board because they aren't a threat to the plane. Maybe they would do better on the red team tests if they weren't focused on the wrong things.

The TSA needs to learn how to work more efficiently. Whenever I fly in Europe, the checkpoints operate much quicker and they tend to have half of the people working that a TSA checkpoint uses. If the body scanners are the hold up, use them as secondary screening like they were supposed to be used.