An ambitious passenger-screening programme to speed frequent flyers through airport security checkpoints has lost government support.
Although private entrepreneurs vow to advance the “fast-lanes” for known travellers, the concept of selecting some flyers for less scrutiny and others for more, the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) stance suggests a limited future for this pioneering use of biometrics. The move also suggests growing federal scepticism towards a risk-based philosophy.
The TSA ended its Registered Traveller Programme, with new agency chief Edmund “Kip” Hawley saying: “We learned what we needed to know.” In its 14 months of operation at five airports, about 10,000 frequent flyers in selected airline programmes used it. But the new Bush budget specifies no funds to keep Registered Traveller going.
Congress, in its most recent funding bills, wants the programme continued and this may clear the way for privately operated programmes. One New York firm, Verified Identity Pass, provides smart-cards in an Orlando airport registered-flyer programme and has signed deals to give customers of Cendant’s Orbitz for Business and Travelport an unspecified discount off its $80 annual fee. Other airports may adopt the Orlando programme, which has 9,000 paying members. Boston Logan has its own programme, and Washington Dulles and Reagan and the main airports in Columbus, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Minneapolis/St Paul, Phoenix and San Francisco have formed an interoperability consortium for a national registered traveller programme.
The Registered Traveller programme became a peg for critics of larger screening, which has stalled for nearly four years as officials seek a politically acceptable pre-screen programme to separate higher-risk flyers from the masses. That programme has foundered technically as well as politically. Hawley insists he supports a risk-based approach, but praises “randomness of security” so that “terrorists cannot predict what will happen at each checkpoint in every airport”.
Source: Airline Business
