San Jose Airport to Offer Fast-Track System

For $79.95, you can avoid an airport bottleneck.

Or at least get through it a little faster.

San Jose’s international airport announced Wednesday that it will become the second airfield in the country to offer passengers the opportunity to avoid some security checks by paying an additional fee and undergoing background checks.

If the system is approved by the Transportation Security Administration, as expected, passengers who pay $79.95 a year will be allowed to use special screening lanes at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and will not have to remove their coats and shoes.

To qualify for the fast-track “registered traveler” service, a passenger would have to complete an online application, provide fingerprints and images of their irises, and pass a TSA-supervised background check.

The program, called Clear, has been in operation since July at Orlando International Airport in Florida, where more than 10,000 travelers have signed up. Marketing, recruiting travelers and verifying identities are being handled by Verified Identity Pass Inc., which has won the contracts in Orlando and San Jose.

The registered traveler program “will be very beneficial, especially for our business travelers,” said Marina Rennecke, a spokeswoman for the San Jose airport. “That’s whom it was designed for.”

She said the airport could have the system in operation by June.

TSA tentatively approved Clear after testing the system at Los Angeles International Airport and at airports in Minneapolis, Houston, Boston and Washington last year.

When the service might be offered at LAX has yet to be determined, but TSA chief Kip Hawley said earlier this month that he intends to have the system “up and operating” throughout the nation “as fast as we can.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has warned that terrorists could use false background information to sign up for the program, then use the fast-track lane to avoid detection. And Tom Ridge, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told a Business Travel News reporter last summer that “there is no guarantee” that such a security breach wouldn’t happen.

But Ridge added that the likelihood of a breach was very small, and travelers who tested the system said they liked it, with 98% supporting expanding the program, according to Hawley.

Officials at LAX, where the system was tested at the United Airlines terminal, said there was no more resentment shown by “regular” passengers to fast-track passengers than there is to the first-class passengers who are allowed to board a plane ahead of coach-class passengers.