- Hundreds of people have breached airport security since March 2023, the TSA revealed in an interview with the Washington Post.
- That’s a massive increase from 2022, and the agency told the Washington Post it wants to crack down.
- Most incidents, such as travelers returning via one-way exits, had no “bad intent.”
Have you ever wished you could skip the line at the airport?
It turns out that 300 people since March 2023 have done just that by bypassing the TSA.
“This is a bigger problem than we thought,” Transportation Security Administration spokesman R. Carter Langston told the Washington Post in a new interview.
This statistic marks a massive increase from previous years; there were only 29 airport security breaches in 2019 and 72 in 2022, the agency told the Post.
Langston said these violations constitute a “trend” that the TSA wants to crack down on. That said, the “vast majority” of violations “do not appear to have bad intentions,” he told the Post, with most resulting from accidents, impatience or people searching for misplaced items.
In more than 200 violations last year, people re-entered in one-way exits, while in 80 cases, people evaded travel document checks, according to the Post. In those 80 cases, all passengers were still screened by a metal detector or body scanner, Langston said.
The Post noted that several incidents in recent months support the TSA’s new numbers.
In February, a passenger walked through an unmanned body scanner. In another incident that same month, another traveler bypassed identity checks and flew to Los Angeles without a ticket. She was arrested by the FBI upon arrival but was not charged, according to the Post.
The TSA is testing new ways to stem security breaches, the outlet reported, including solid plastic or glass barriers in place of the nylon belts commonly used as line separators, as well as one-way doors that close behind travelers as they pass through.
To improve the passenger experience, TSA announced in March that it would test self-checkout-style security checks at Harry Reid Las Vegas International Airport, but only for TSA PreCheck passengers.
businessinsider
