With the busiest travel day of the year approaching the Sunday after Thanksgiving (2.8 million people will pass through U.S. airports that day), the Transportation Security Administration says it’s better prepared to handle record numbers of travelers and should make it through Christmas without gridlock.
After hours long lines at some airports and public outrage over stranded passengers, the beleaguered Transportation Security Administration (TSA) just pulled off a major restructuring, dramatically reducing wait times even as summer air travel surged to record levels. Nationally, over the 4th of July, wait times averaged 10 minutes and PreCheck lines averaged 5 minutes.
“How TSA dug out of its checkpoint quagmire is both a remarkable story of rare, quick change inside a big government agency,” writes the Wall Street Journal (July 21, 2016)–and it all involved a series of basic OM analyses that your students could have developed. Here are some of the TSA changes:
“We completely changed the way we operate,” said TSA’s administrator.
Classroom discussion questions:
Queuing up at the Orlando airport last week, en route to giving a lecture at Tulane University, I encountered a 40+ minute wait for TSA security checks. Returning from New Orleans a few days later, the TSA walk through took less than 2 minutes. Reading the Wall Street Journal’s article “Airport Security Lines Grow” that day (March 3, 2016), leads me to believe this is a good topic for class when you cover Waiting Line Models in Module D. Here is what the Journal writes: “Longer lines are the result of a collision of three changes: reduced staffing from federal budget cuts, a surge in travelers at some airports, and efforts to fix significant screening lapses.”
Current staffing is about 41,000 screeners, below the congressional cap of 42,500, and 5,600 fewer screeners than in 2011. At the same time, TSA has been intentionally slowing down security screening to tighten it up. This comes after some failures to identify weapons and other mistakes during covert government testing.
It is not just Orlando International. Chicago O’Hare has had lines this week snaking through concourses, delaying hundreds of flights. Atlanta has seen peak-time security screening waits of an hour recently because checkpoints are “woefully understaffed.” TSA and airlines have started advising travelers to arrive up to 2 hours before a domestic departure and 3 hours for international flights.
American Airlines says it has had to delay hundreds of flights in January. At Delta’s New York Kennedy terminal, the PreCheck expedited screening line stretched almost out the building door on a recent Friday morning. Airports in Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Denver, Seattle and Miami all say they have seen longer lines at checkpoints over the past two months.
Classroom discussion questions:
In anticipation that more fliers will be eager to pay for expedited checkpoint screening, the Transportation Security Administration has promised to award $15,000 in cash prizes to whomever can design a faster waiting line system, reports Nextgov (July 18, 2014). The competition is on InnoCentive, a website for crowdsourcing solutions to problems, which enables individuals and teams to submit proposals. “There is a guaranteed award,” the contest overview states. “The total payout will be $15,000, with at least one award being no smaller than $5,000.”
The challenge aims to solve expected problems with TSA PreCheck, a program where passengers who undergo a background check and pay $85 get access to fast lanes that don’t require removing shoes, coats, liquids and laptops. “Current queue layouts at TSA Pre✓ airports will need to adapt to support the increasing population of TSA Pre✓ passengers,” the competition states. “TSA is looking for the Next Generation Checkpoint Queue Design Model to apply a scientific and simulation modeling approach to meet queue design and configuration needs of the dynamic security screening environment with TSA Pre✓.” TSA also is asking for approaches that would help speed standard, “free” waiting lines.
Competitors must supply a proposal that considers physical logistics, peak hours and staffing schedules, among other constraints. The “line” extends from the point where a passenger joins the end of the queue to the metal detector or body scan machine. Wait times cannot be more than 5 minutes for PreCheck and 10 minutes for standard lines. Also, the model should enable TSA to apply a “Computer Aided Design drawing to define the physical space available for queuing.”
Competitors are required to provide an animation of a computer screen that shows passengers flowing through lines. It must display real-time reporting during the animation, and allow a user to pause a simulation run when necessary for analysis or evaluation. What a great example of a complex, real-world queuing problem to ask your students to discuss!
Classroom discussion questions:
1. Why is TSA turning to crowdsourcing?
2. What ideas do you have for speeding the lines?
Fliers gripe that getting through airport security lines can be too slow. Now, it may be fliers who are slow to sign up for a program to speed them through the lines. The Transportation Security Administration is aggressively trying to encourage more people to sign up for TSA Precheck, reports The Wall Street Journal (April 17, 2014).
Precheck, launched in 2011, is much-loved among travelers because they don’t have to take off their shoes and jackets, don’t have to pull liquids and laptops out of baggage, and can walk through metal detectors without a full-body scan. By doing background checks on Precheck enrollees and scanning law-enforcement databases, TSA offers what is essentially pre-9/11 screening to “trusted travelers.”
TSA wants lots more people enrolled in Precheck to make better use of its designated security lanes, which currently number 590 at 118 U.S. airports. “It’s one of the last great bargains the U.S. government is offering,” TSA Administrator John Pistole has joked. To entice travelers into Precheck and test TSA’s ability to handle more people, the agency has been selecting regular passengers to go through Precheck security lanes and get it printed on their boarding passes. Selection is based on criteria like passengers’ travel history and the route being flown. TSA officers trained in behavior detection also can move passengers they deem low risk from regular queues into Precheck lanes.
Pistole said he has heard the complaints about Precheck lanes getting clogged, and TSA has already decided to stop moving travelers 75 years of age and older into Precheck service, unless they are enrolled, because they sometimes can take 10 minutes to move through. “It used to be great, but recently the Precheck lines have been the slowest of all the lines,” said Northeastern University OM Professor Fred Van Bennekom, who has timed TSA lines. “Sometimes there’s almost no one in regular lines and we’re all backed up at Precheck.”
Classroom discussion questions:
1. Why is the TSA using the Precheck program?
2. What else can operations managers do to speed up the security screening process?