How to avoid airport lines

By William Birdthistle

updated 5:35 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2007

Nowadays, a trip to the airport is usually an unwelcome opportunity to rub shoulders, shoes and little plastic bags of goo with swarms of fellow travelers. The typical experience involves hauling bags foot by foot across acres of linoleum, followed by a St. Vitus’s dance of shedding clothes, tubbing laptops and scrounging for boarding passes to the barked commands of security officials.

Happily, a collection of companies are developing new ways to ameliorate the process of security screening at U.S. airports.

One of those companies, Verified Identity Pass, offers a program called Clear which advertises itself as a “faster way through airport security.” Members who pay the $99.95 annual fee to join and who submit to biometric and background screening are given access to a private lane, which purports to usher them through security with more predictability, greater speed and less hassle ($28.00 of that fee goes to the TSA to cover the cost of completing a security threat assessment). “Clear has made this new life of flying commercial, which has gone down the toilet, a little more bearable,” said program member Henry Morgan, regional manager of Highline Products in Orlando.

Clear is one example of the Registered Traveler programs that the Transportation Security Administration has developed in conjunction with private companies in order to, as the TSA puts it, “provide expedited security screening for passengers who volunteer biometric and biographic information” and who “successfully complete a security threat assessment.” To date, Verified Identity Pass and four other companies — Unisys, Saflink, Verant and Vigilant — have satisfied TSA’s criteria to act as providers of Registered Traveler services. As the TSA notes, "The program is market-driven and offered by the private sector with TSA largely playing a facilitating role."

At this point, however, Clear is the only operational Registered Traveler service, having just launched a national rollout after conducting a pilot program at Orlando International Airport over the past 18 months. “More than 35,000 members have signed up for Clear in Orlando, and we have a 94 percent renewal rate,” said Cindy Rosenthal, spokesperson for Verified Identity Pass.

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Clear began its national rollout in mid-January with the opening of lanes in British Airways’s Terminal 7 at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The company has announced plans to expand its program in the near future to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport, San José Mineta International Airport and the Air France gates at JFK International Airport.

It's safe to assume that all of these Registered Traveler programs will be similar in nature (Unisys plans to start rolling out programs this spring), and Clear is a useful case study in how the process works. First, a passenger completes an enrollment form on the www.flyclear.com web site. Applicants open an account by entering basic biographical and payment information and designating their home airport (though Clear will not charge a membership fee until it begins a program out of the home airport).

Clear Registered Traveler Members who are approved by the TSA are granted access to Clear lanes in addition to the regular lanes at airport security. When they reach the front of the queue, members must enter their membership card into specialized machines and offer their hand or eye (whichever they prefer) to be scanned for a match with the biometric information coded on their card.

The next step is for passengers to make a visit in person to a designated counter at one of the five airports currently slated to host their lanes. At the airport, members will be asked to produce two forms of government identification and to have digital scans taken of all 10 of their fingerprints and both of their irises. “We then send the entire application to the TSA, and they do the background vetting,” said Rosenthal. “In two to four weeks, we receive a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

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