10 ms·

> a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports. Why could you not replicate the security procedure across all lobbies?

ngneer 6y ago
Money?
sokoloff 6y ago
Presumably, instead of TSA, you'd need TTSA instead (Tens of Thousands Standing Around). There's a certain minimum staffing level for any TSA checkpoint and the overhead doesn't scale down linearly to checkpoints serving fractions of the lanes today. I don't know what the minimum is, but it seems like it's at least 7 or 8 (1 on ID inspection, 1 on baggage scan, 1 on backscatter, 1 supervisor, 1-2 on baggage manual inspection who could also metal detect/manually inspect wheelchairs, 2 available for "male/female assist", 1 supervisor) Surges are also better handled by centralizing the checkpoints. Whatever lounge is headed towards flight 123 is going to have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates in a current-design airport. If you have a queue at security outside the single lounge, are you really going to close the door and tell everyone in the queue they're missing their flight? Or will you put pressure on security to overlook things to keep things moving (providing an obvious attack vector for adversaries)? Add it all up, average it all out, move it 100 meters away, and a security delay seems more reasonably a passenger fault to arrive early enough.
- mbreese 6y ago
  > have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates That’s a very good point. And, the airport itself has already balanced the departure times for all flights across the airport. Every flight has a pre-assigned departure window, so in theory, when you average all flights, you shouldn’t have (many) peaky surges in passenger load. Or at the very least, they would be predictable.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Hub airports tend to have large departure banks where all the flights arrive, hold, and depart within a certain time frame, for ease of connections. So this isn’t strictly true.
jcranmer 6y ago
There's effectively two main schools of designing multiple-terminal airports. One school is to design each terminal as a separate island in a vast sea of tarmac, so that all of the inter-terminal transportation has to be done post-security. This is the model of, say, ATL or IAD. The other school is to put all of your terminals around a central cluster such that every terminal can have independent pre-security access. This is what, say, ORD or DFW do. In the latter setup, each terminal gets independent security lines, but there is often (although, as in DCA, not always!) post-security connections between terminals that allow you to choose any security line you want, although at the potential expense of a lot of extra walking. But in the former setup, there really isn't any alternative to a single security line for everybody. And if you have an airport like IAD where space was never budgeted for that security line in the original terminal construction, it can get pretty bad.
- em-bee 6y ago
  i have seen airports where the security check is per gate. you don't get spikes on those because only the passengers for that particular flight will be in the queue

ngneer 6y ago

Money?

sokoloff 6y ago

Presumably, instead of TSA, you'd need TTSA instead (Tens of Thousands Standing Around). There's a certain minimum staffing level for any TSA checkpoint and the overhead doesn't scale down linearly to checkpoints serving fractions of the lanes today. I don't know what the minimum is, but it seems like it's at least 7 or 8 (1 on ID inspection, 1 on baggage scan, 1 on backscatter, 1 supervisor, 1-2 on baggage manual inspection who could also metal detect/manually inspect wheelchairs, 2 available for "male/female assist", 1 supervisor) Surges are also better handled by centralizing the checkpoints. Whatever lounge is headed towards flight 123 is going to have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates in a current-design airport. If you have a queue at security outside the single lounge, are you really going to close the door and tell everyone in the queue they're missing their flight? Or will you put pressure on security to overlook things to keep things moving (providing an obvious attack vector for adversaries)? Add it all up, average it all out, move it 100 meters away, and a security delay seems more reasonably a passenger fault to arrive early enough.

mbreese 6y ago
> have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates That’s a very good point. And, the airport itself has already balanced the departure times for all flights across the airport. Every flight has a pre-assigned departure window, so in theory, when you average all flights, you shouldn’t have (many) peaky surges in passenger load. Or at the very least, they would be predictable.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Hub airports tend to have large departure banks where all the flights arrive, hold, and depart within a certain time frame, for ease of connections. So this isn’t strictly true.

jcranmer 6y ago

There's effectively two main schools of designing multiple-terminal airports. One school is to design each terminal as a separate island in a vast sea of tarmac, so that all of the inter-terminal transportation has to be done post-security. This is the model of, say, ATL or IAD. The other school is to put all of your terminals around a central cluster such that every terminal can have independent pre-security access. This is what, say, ORD or DFW do. In the latter setup, each terminal gets independent security lines, but there is often (although, as in DCA, not always!) post-security connections between terminals that allow you to choose any security line you want, although at the potential expense of a lot of extra walking. But in the former setup, there really isn't any alternative to a single security line for everybody. And if you have an airport like IAD where space was never budgeted for that security line in the original terminal construction, it can get pretty bad.

em-bee 6y ago
i have seen airports where the security check is per gate. you don't get spikes on those because only the passengers for that particular flight will be in the queue