Jumpseatnews.com - United Airlines flight attendant resources

Home > News > From Weapons To Spilled Food, TSA Screeners See It All

From Weapons To Spilled Food, TSA Screeners See It All

print
Source: Media Article

Date: Dec 23, 2004

Source: Washington Post
Author: Sara Kehaulani Goo

Security screener with disgusted expressionIt is 4 p.m. at Reagan National Airport and the lines of anxious passengers eager to leave Washington are now backed up at the south security checkpoint in a line about 50 people long. Suddenly, there is a small crisis at the checkpoint's lane four.

Federal airline security screener Krista Knieriem had been smoothly moving bags along the conveyor belt as she looked up at a multicolored screen. There had been a delay just moments ago, when she spotted a fork -- a prohibited item -- in someone's carry-on bag; another screener removed it. But now the bags are backed up, and a traveler's sandwich, packed in a plastic takeout box, gets smashed between two bins. Suddenly, tuna salad is tumbling down the belt, as everyone in the vicinity can tell by the odor. "Oh, oh!" says the male passenger who brought the sandwich. Knieriem stops the X-ray belt, and she and her co-workers scramble to clean it up. One picks up tuna salad -- with lots of mayo -- from the floor while passengers stand on their toes to peek at what the holdup is all about. Within seconds, another screener appears with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle filled with cleaner. Just as quickly as it spread, the confusion dies down.

"It happens all the time," said Knieriem, who apologizes to the man with the sandwich, who, in turn, apologizes for holding up the line. "Coffee is the thing that spills the most. Ev-er-y day," she adds for emphasis.

The Transportation Security Administration has come under fire from passengers complaining about security procedures. Some claim that rules about removing their shoes before walking through security vary from airport to airport. Others have complained about up-close-and-personal pat-downs and unpredictable wait times.

Last week, The Washington Post spent a day with one of TSA's screeners at National Airport to get a sense of a typical day on the other side of the security checkpoint. No one hears passenger complaints more often than security screeners, who must learn a variety of techniques to deal with the mundane, the scary -- and the occasional traveler who doesn't want to abide by the rules.

At National, like most airports, the TSA staff is short-handed. Nearly 20 percent of the 45,000 employees TSA hired after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have quit or been fired over the past year, and the agency only now is beginning to replace them. With an average salary of $30,258, the airport's 433 TSA screeners are commonly asked to work mandatory overtime, with an average total of about 46 hours a week. Holidays are nearly impossible to get off.

The hours are particularly tense during the holiday travel season, which officially kicked off last weekend. More than 188,000 people are expected to fly out of the region's three major airports today, the busiest airline travel day of this holiday season.
Reading Passengers

The day of a security screener often begins at 4:30 a.m., when most people are sound asleep. If screeners are short-staffed or off to a slow start in the early morning, the longer lines tend to drag much longer into the day. Some mornings, passengers wait more than a hour to get through the checkpoint.

Before the shift starts at 5 a.m., screeners huddle in the break room or a conference room with a supervisor to receive the latest information about threats to aviation and new gadgets to watch out for. Last Thursday, a TSA supervisor briefed more than a dozen screeners about a new computer memory device made by Swiss Army that is also equipped with a small knife.

The supervisor calls the roll and then screeners are assigned their first duty at one of several stations: "wanding" passengers, managing the flow through metal detectors, X-ray examination, monitoring the exit lane and a job the screeners call "town crier." That one calls for one screener to stand with a small microphone and remind passengers to take off their coats and remove laptops from their bags before moving through the checkpoint. Every 30 minutes, they rotate positions.

Like workers in a hospital emergency ward, the screeners take their posts and encounter one small drama after another. They move around constantly, trying to strike a balance with passengers -- at times trying to show a sense of humor, such as the time a female passenger is asked to remove her belt and she offers to take it all off -- but also a sense of duty, such as the time screeners hush a man in line who begins to talk loudly about not having a bomb in his bag.

Knieriem, a cheerful 25-year-old who wears her hair in two braided buns on the side of her head, starts off wanding select passengers who alarm the metal detector. First, she waves the detector over an elderly woman, then a young Japanese woman who doesn't speak much English and then a woman wearing all black with a swooping hat. In between each pat-down, Knieriem moves with lightning speed to quickly unzip and peek inside the passengers' carry-on items.

Within 15 minutes, Knieriem has whizzed back and forth a half-dozen times from the X-ray machine to an area the screeners call the "fish bowl," where passengers receive a pat-down. Knieriem said her former job as a manager of a custom frame store helps her to quickly "read" each passenger to get a sense of how comfortable they are with having a metal detector waved over their bodies and being touched on their chests.

"Retail experience has helped me with this job," Knieriem said. Most travelers "know the drill," she said. But a few times a week, she gets a passenger who gets angry for one reason or another and explodes. Most of the time, she said, passengers get angry because they think they know the rules -- such as whether they can wear shoes through the walk-through metal detector -- but the rules have changed. "I try not to take it personally," she said.
Meeting Steady Tests

TSA's policy requires that passengers be screened by someone of the same sex. Most women don't appear to enjoy having Knieriem touch between and around their breasts. "It's nobody's favorite thing to do," she said, but no passengers have complained to her. The trick, she said, is to complete the pat-down quickly and explain everything upfront. "You have to inform people what you're going to do, otherwise they think you're just doing something on your own."

Later, when Knieriem switches posts, moving to the X-ray machine, she quickly analyzes each bag on the belt, each of which appear to the untrained eye as a junkyard of metal spaghetti. Men's shoes appear with metal slabs inside -- arch support, she explains. Women's heels stand out with their scary-looking metal spikes and nails. Knieriem can quickly identify each as harmless or a potential threat.

"See that long pointy thing?" she asks, pointing to what resembles a long hypodermic needle in someone's bag. "Electric toothbrush." She correctly guesses what kind of car one passenger drives by the shape of the key on the key chain. "Do you drive a Jetta?" she asks. Inside another bag, she points to a circular object. "White House ornament," she said. "You see a lot of those."

Chirp! Chirp! Moments later, a passenger has brought a bird in a cage through the checkpoint two lanes over. The bird's owner is holding the animal and has placed the bird's cage on the X-ray belt. Part of the screeners' job is to make sure passengers don't accidentally put animals through the X-ray machines.

The TSA screeners see all kinds of animals, Knieriem said. They also see movie stars such as Kevin Spacey and politicians such as Richard A. Gephardt. More VIPs come through here than any other airport, said Patrick D. Hynes, TSA's security director at National.

Of course, the main job is detecting explosives and weapons. The TSA is constantly training screeners to do the job better. Every week, a few screeners disguise themselves and try to get through the checkpoint with guns strapped to their legs or hidden inside a teddy bear. Since they started the covert tests, the screeners' performance has improved dramatically, Hynes said, but he declined to disclose the results.

"We need to be a step above every other airport because we're in the nation's capital," Hynes said.

Knieriem said she can recognize her co-workers in the funny outfits most of the time. "It's the same people lately," she said. But she is tested in other ways.

Late in her shift, she stops the X-ray belt, pushes a button that makes a light on the X-ray machine flash and asks a co-worker to look at something suspicious.

"Can I get an ETD?" she says in a loud voice, which means she wants a bag screened for explosives. She asks if this is a test. Sometimes the screen displays an explosive device that is really a false image projected onto the screen.

Another screener, Marvin Whetstone, recognizes the object: a breathing machine for people with sleep apnea. A passenger nearby confirms that it's his device.

"Oh, okay. Sorry," Knieriem said. Just another potential terrorist threat that turned out to be nothing.

< Return to Latest News


Quick Find

Travel and Safety

And now a word from...

Printed from www.jumpseatnews.com. Have a nice day!