The Transportation Safety Administration has taken its experiment in touchless airport check-ins from experiment to full-on operation at Los Angeles International Airport, where all its TSA checkpoints have been converted.
The new stations, which had been in test status since 2018, before the pandemic made them even more significant. The system, which TSA calls CAT for Credential Authentication Scanner, replaces stations where travelers had to hand their IDs to agents who scanned them for authenticity and matched them to a boarding pass.
In the new system, passengers insert their IDs into the scanner. The scanned data is then compared to the Secure Flight database, where airlines have for years entered required passenger security information and flight info. Because that information is already there, a boarding pass is not needed for TSA. The scanner is programmed to recognize more than 2500 kinds of ID, and to reject expired documents.
There are about 1500 of the units scattered across 125 U.S. airports; LAX is the first to make the full transition. The new technology not only reduces contact between agents and passengers, it is also significantly faster. The units cost about $27,000 each; TSA has not said how soon it expects it to become the norm.
