July 22, 2022 by Beat of Hawaii 8 Comments

Travel to and from Hawaii is getting easier and faster, with two significant improvements to TSA security procedures for flights to and from the mainland and elsewhere. One had early deployment at the Lihue Airport Kauai TSA which we wrote about when it started last month. That major innovation is a new carry-on scanner that lets you keep your laptop and liquids in your carry-on bag. The other is called Credential Authentication Technology (CAT), the result of which is that TSA will no longer scan your boarding pass at security.

TSA had already been widely deploying (CAT), and we can confirm it is now available at all airports serving nonstop flights to the islands. Those airports include:

Anchorage (ANC) Atlanta (ATL) Austin (AUS) Boston (BOS) Chicago (ORD) Denver (DEN) Dallas (DFW) Honolulu (HNL) Washington DC (IAD) Houston (IAH) New York (JFK) Las Vegas (LAS) Lihue, Kauai (LIH) Los Angeles (LAX) Minneapolis (MSP) Oakland (OAK) Ontario (ONT) Orange County (SNA) Phoenix (PHX) Portland (PDX) Sacramento (SMF) San Diego (SAN) San Francisco (SFO) San Jose (SJC) Seattle (SEA)

Travelers at these airports no longer have boarding passes scanned by security. Instead, TSA has an electronically linked system that associates your ID with its flight database.

Checking in with your airline is still required, as well as having an electronic or paper boarding pass. Boarding passes will not be used at security but only at the passenger boarding gate for your Hawaii or other flights. Passengers 18 years old and over will show a valid ID, such as a driver’s license, passport, or other approved government-issued ID, to use the new CAT.

TSA has significantly streamlined and expedited the security process, which has stood largely without change since its inception more than 20 years ago. They are now implementing new CT scanners to let all passengers keep laptops and allowed liquids in carry-on luggage. Removal of these has always been one source of slow security screening.

Four of these state-of-the-art scanners were recently installed on Kauai, and the deployment of other airports nationwide is in process. TSA said, “In the future, the goal is to keep laptops and 3-1-1 liquids inside the bag during checkpoint screening.”

Those who have paid TSA PreCheck already experience some of these advancements, even before the CT scanners, including retaining liquids and laptops in carry-on luggage and not removing shoes.

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Any improvement for passengers sounds wonderful to me! The Pandemic had a lovely silver lining of speeding up technology use by government and I for one am grateful.

Anything TSA does will not speed things up, nor will it make LIH TSA agents more user friendly. I’m still annoyed by an experience I had several years ago with a TSA agent at LIH. “How is your day going?” “Fine” “See that it stays that way.” What? That TSA agent would have been fired on the spot had I been his boss. See that it stays that way? Really? Thousands Standing Around has been a joke over its entire existence. And, yes, I have TSA Pre-Check, and have had it for years.

TSA at Lihue is a complete mess with massive bottlenecks that regularly cause passengers to miss their flights. I missed a flight in March thanks to a 45 minute TSA line at Lihue and I wasn’t the only one. The reservation agent said it happens every day, that TSA opens only one lane and either can’t or won’t open a second during high volume peaks resulting in lines of passengers needing to reschedule. Additionally, for supposedly being a small “friendly” island airport, they have the rudest most arrogant TSA officers I’ve ever encountered (except maybe for Chicago). TSA Lihue is the only TSA check I actively try to avoid. So the prospect of anything from TSA Lihue being applied nation wide is scarey indeed!!!

This was not true on July 4th at LIH airport for TSA Pre-check passengers. We had to remove electronic devices and food. TSA was still using Old machines for us.

Phoenix has had machines that don’t require removal of liquids and laptops for several years. The problem is that they only have a couple of them. So, most of the time,you still have to remove liquids and laptops.

What’s crazy is the girl that was running away from a murder she committed, and went to south america with a fake passport! No problemo, and they worry about us ordinary people? take your shoes off put in your computer.. yadda yadda yadda

I’m a bit confused with this “new” technology your are talking about. We (STL) haven’t had to show a boarding pass when going through TSA for well over a year. They take our drivers license, stick it into a little machine, and check us out that way. Are you talking about something different?

Wow!!! This is so cool 😎 it is about time….lol! This is the 1st time I heard about it. God bless everyone in the blog….read Psalms 91:11 😍😇

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