Beverly Vogt, a transportation security officer at Sky
Harbor Airport
demonstrates how she looks at questionable I.D.'s using a magnifying glass.
Until a few months ago, airline contract workers were gatekeepers at
the security checkpoints, said Nico Melendez, TSA spokesman.
The
government watchdogs decided to pilot a program in Phoenix to fill the jobs with
their own inspectors, Melendez said.
Frequent flier Christine Marshall of
Phoenix noticed.
“They are more cautious, more careful. They are
actually looking at the photo and looking at you. They always look at mine
twice,” Marshall said. That’s because she lost a lot of weight and doesn’t much
look like her drivers license mug, she said.
But does the double
scrutiny make her feel safer boarding a plane?
“No. If something is going
to happen, it will happen,” she said.
Mike McGrath of Las Vegas never
noticed a difference in those checking his documents, but he is equally
nonchalant about the change.
“I think it’s all window dressing anyway,”
he said.
But Melendez said the pilot program has been deemed a success,
and the TSA is rolling it out nationwide, filling 1,300 checkpoint entry slots
in airports around the country.
The trained inspectors are better at
spotting phony documents, he said, and they get an updated government watch list
before every shift.
The TSA workers have turned several would-be Sky
Harbor passengers with faux IDs over to airport law enforcement officers,
Melendez said. But he wouldn’t say what they did to their documents or whether
they were eventually allowed to board planes.
Criminals might be better
off just showing up without any ID.
Contrary to what you might think, the
TSA does allow passengers to pass through a checkpoint without any
identification.
They just get more thorough screenings — a wanding or pat
down, Melendez said. He noted that people have had wallets stolen on vacation
and still have to fly home.
Also on the agenda for Sky Harbor are new
body screening machines. In February, the local airport got the first
backscatter, which uses low intensity X-ray beams that scan the body surface to
detect weapons hidden beneath clothing.
An alternative to a pat down for
those who set off an alarm in the walk-through screener, the machine has been a
hit with passengers despite pre-installation worries that it would reveal too
much.
The TSA said earlier this month it will begin testing millimeter
wave imaging machines, which use electromagnetic waves to generate an image of a
passenger based on energy reflected from the body, as well as more backscatters
in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and New York-JFK.
Melendez said he doesn’t have
a schedule for which machines will be installed at Sky Harbor or exactly
when.
Sky Harbor spokeswoman Claire Simeone said none of the security
changes have impacted passenger flow.
