TSA Precheck at IAD
Jan 24, 2020, 7:10 am
#16
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Lucky you. I've never had that experience before evening flights out of Dulles on Thursdays and Fridays. Here's a pic I took from a Thursday in August of the Precheck line at around 5. They've since moved the Clear folks which makes it a little better. But I certainly have not found Dulles a ghost town on Friday evenings.
Yeah, in my ~50 times flying out of IAD in the last three years I've never seen it even close to that bad. The vast majority were Fridays on the ~7:30pm SFO departure (exact timing moved around a bit over the years) so I was probably clearing around 6:45 but I've taken UA340 my fair share too and not run into that.
Jan 24, 2020, 8:22 am
#17
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While that picture looks bad, each one of those lines goes to a separate ID checker (unless things have changed) so it moves fast. I've seen it like that a few times and don't think I've waited longer than 10-15 mins.
Jan 24, 2020, 8:27 am
#18
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Jan 24, 2020, 8:37 am
#19
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This. The rare times the lines are that long, pre-check is still better than the CF that is the regular lines, especially during the early to late afternoon crush created by all the international departures headed east.
Jan 24, 2020, 8:40 am
#20
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Clear+PreCheck = goodness
Jan 24, 2020, 8:43 am
#22
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And there and in my experience, the bottleneck for pre-check isn't at ID check, but at the belts/detectors after. There are more ID checkers than metal detectors.
Jan 24, 2020, 8:48 am
#23
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Jan 24, 2020, 10:18 am
#24
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Not quite the same, but SFO has a GS line (or really a separate entrance bypassing the regular precheck line).
Jan 24, 2020, 10:18 am
#25
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Jan 24, 2020, 11:06 am
#28
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Fair point. Our line was extremely long per se (longest I've seen at CLEAR but not long in a normal sense). How CLEAR was managing the flow was the issue.
Jan 24, 2020, 12:34 pm
#29
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So you're saying they actually need to maintain the 4 CLEAR employees to one CLEAR user ratio they have during off-peak hours?
Jan 24, 2020, 12:42 pm
#30
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The last time I was at IAD (last week) the problem is that they moved Clear and Precheck off to the side away from the standard Precheck lines but did not give Clear a dedicated security ID checker or dedicated security screening line or belt. So there was a lot of Clear buildup as the checker alternated between Clear and non Clear and then there was the scrum to get in the screening lines where there was 3 lines going into two belts. Very poor experience from Clear and they blamed TSA (which seems right) . TSA moved Clear to give it more room and get it away from the standard Precheck and then they stiff them on the lines dedicated to Clear.