TSA Unveils Passenger Self-Screening Lanes at Vegas Airport

 

(AP) - Federal airport security officials unveiled passenger self-screening lanes Wednesday at busy Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, with plans to test it for use in other cities around the country.

“How do we step into the future? This is a step,” said a system designer, Dimitri Kusnezov, science and technology under secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “The interface with people makes all the difference.”

The Transportation Security Administration checkpoint — initially only in Las Vegas, only for TSA PreCheck customers and only using the English language — incorporates a screen with do-it-yourself instructions telling people how to smoothly pass themselves and their carry-on luggage through pre-flight screening with little or no help from uniformed TSA officers.

“We want to avoid passengers having to be patted down,” said John Fortune, program manager of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Screening at Speed” program and a developer with Kusnezov of the prototype.

Instead of a boxy belt-fed device using a stack of gray trays, the futuristic-looking baggage and personal belongings inspection system looks like a scaled-down starship medical magnetic resonance imaging machine. It uses an automated bin return that sanitizes trays with germ-killing ultraviolet light between users.