You Can Walk Someone to the Gate Again, at Thirteen Airports

Twenty-five years after the practice ended, you can once again walk someone to their gate at a US airport – if you are in the right programme and at the right airport. TSA has launched Gateside by TSA PreCheck, a pilot that lets vetted travellers without a plane ticket clear a security checkpoint and enter the secure side of the terminal. The programme is free. It is also narrow: it runs at 13 airports, and eligibility is restricted to people who already hold active TSA PreCheck membership.

The mechanics are deliberately unglamorous. Applicants register online one to three days before the visit, entering their personal details and their Known Traveler Number, and wait for approval. Approved visitors then enter through a PreCheck lane with an acceptable form of identification, the same way a ticketed PreCheck passenger would. The pass is valid for a single calendar day and allows re-entry within that day. Children can take part but must be registered by an accompanying adult.

Los Angeles, Dallas Fort Worth, Harry Reid in Las Vegas and San Diego are among the participating airports, with the rest spread across Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Michigan, Kansas, Indiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Utah. The list leans toward mid-size airports rather than the busiest hubs on the eastern seaboard, which makes sense for a pilot: the whole exercise is a test of whether checkpoints can absorb additional non-flying bodies without degrading throughput for people who actually have somewhere to be.

The use cases are the obvious ones. Meeting an elderly relative at the gate rather than at baggage claim, seeing a child onto a flight, helping someone who does not travel often navigate a terminal they find bewildering. None of that has been possible at scale since 2001, and a handful of airlines and airports have run limited versions of it under their own escort rules. What is new here is that TSA itself is running the vetting, at no cost, and treating gate access as something that can be granted by background check rather than by boarding pass.

Sources: CBS News, Transportation Security Administration