Hoping to avert a summer meltdown, federal officials said Monday they plan to make changes in airport security screening to ease growing lines in Atlanta and other U.S. cities.
Airport officials are “rightfully concerned about delays, as we are,” Peter Neffenger, chief of the Transportation Security Administration, said after meeting in Atlanta with officials from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and Delta Air Lines.
Neffenger said the TSA will use more overtime to boost staffing, speed up training of new screeners, deploy more dog teams that augment human workers and try new techniques and wait-line configurations to speed the process.
“It’s a production problem. What we’re doing is looking at the industrial engineering,” he said.
Neffenger stopped short, however, of saying how much those moves might boost capacity at checkpoints or reduce wait times that have grown noticeably in recent months.
“I think it will improve it,” he said.
The agency expects measures to be in place by Memorial Day, said Mark Howell, a TSA spokesman.
Neffenger’s visit followed a Feb. 12 letter to him from Hartsfield-Jackson general manager Miguel Southwell, in which Southwell complained of rising wait times and said he “dreaded” the coming summer rush.
Southwell also threatened to start the process of replacing TSA screeners with private contractors unless there was a “dramatic shift” in TSA staffing and technology. Southwell’s letter said wait times often exceed 30 minutes and were nearly an hour on one Friday morning last month.
Reese McCranie, a spokesman for Hartsfield-Jackson, called Monday’s meeting “productive.”
He added, “I think it’s too early to say what our confidence is. What is certain is we will work together to find a solution.”
Asked if that means the airport is dropping the privatization threat, he said: “What we’re focused on right now is finding a solution. I’ll leave it at that.”
Neffenger said the TSA, created after 9/11 to boost and standardize airport security, now has 5,600 fewer officers than it did four years ago. He said Congress planned to cut 1,600 more positions but that the agency was able to persuade lawmakers to keep them in the budget, as well as add 300 more.
He did not say how the staffing shifts have specifically affected Hartsfield-Jackson, the world’s busiest airport. It handled a record 100 million passengers last year, with TSA officers screening about 21 million of them. The TSA says volume in Atlanta is up 14 percent year-over-year, twice the national growth rate.
Hartsfield-Jackson officials have periodically complained about TSA staffing and passenger wait times, and both the airport and the agency have tried various measures to speed the flow.
They include additional security checkpoints, the PreCheck trusted traveler program, technology improvements and the use of bomb-sniffing dogs. The TSA increased staffing last year, but in his letter Southwell called it “late and inadequate.”
Neffenger was installed at a time when the agency was under fire after audits that showed screeners missing banned items. He has emphasized a priority on better security and did not appear to back away from that on Monday.
“This is a much more challenging threat environment than it was even a year ago,” he said, an apparent reference to terror activity.
U.S. airports have the option of asking for private contractors to handle screening under TSA supervision, but only two large airports — in San Francisco and Kansas City — use the program. The head of the union representing TSA officers in Georgia has said privatizing screening “would be catastrophic” for the officers and such a transition would be “almost impossible” at Hartsfield-Jackson given its size and passenger volume.
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