Airlines routinely advise passengers to arrive at least 60 minutes before their flights if they’re not checking luggage and 90 minutes if they are. Not all that time is burned getting through a Transportation Security Administration security checkpoint, but according to agency spokespersons, somewhere around 30 minutes of it is. However, passengers already prescreened through TSA’s Pre✓® program can make it through in 10 minutes. Fortuitously, TSA aims to reduce security wait times to 10 minutes for everyone by using a variety of screening improvements, including biometrics.

To improve the speed and flow of passengers going through its airport security screening checkpoints, the U.S.’s Transportation Security Administration has recently taken several promising steps. For one, TSA has been installing and then performance-testing what are called “automated screening lanes,” or ASLs. To date, TSA has been testing these new screening lanes at large, busy U.S. commercial air facilities. If they perform as expected, the government’s lead transportation security agency expects many more such ASLs to go into almost all other airports in the next several years.

According to the Statista website, commercial airlines carried an estimated 4.3 billion passengers on scheduled flights in 2018, with more than 4.5 billion people anticipated to fly in 2019. In 2009, nearly 2.5 billion passengers flew commercially, meaning airlines and airports have seen a passenger traffic increase of 80 percent, or 2 billion people, over the last 10 years. The increase in airline passenger traffic brings many challenges with it, such as just how airports, aviation security companies, and government transportation security agencies will efficiently handle so many travelers.