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On the Road

Something to Sing About, Finally, at Airport Security

OOPS, I’ve lost still another Victorinox Swiss Army Classic pocketknife — the keychain-size one with handy tools, including tiny scissors and an inch-and-a-half blade. They’re $11.97 on Amazon, and I’ve already ordered a new one to replace the one that was confiscated last week at La Guardia Airport in New York.

In my haste to pack and get to the airport for a flight home, I’d simply forgotten to unclip the gadget and tuck it into my checked bag. “Could you please remove that from your keychain?” Officer Nicole Rivera told me at the checkpoint where I had just breezed through the metal detector with my shoes and sports coat on and my laptop in its bag — a headache-free passage thanks to PreCheck, the expedited-screening program that the Transportation Security Administration greatly expanded in late 2013 and which is now used by well over a quarter of all passengers in domestic airports.

Ms. Rivera and her colleagues had spotted the banned device on the X-ray of my laptop bag. But what really struck me was how the screeners combined vigilance with overt pleasantness.

“She’s especially happy because she sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the Mets game last night,” one of the other screeners explained, while Ms. Rivera beamed.

The night before, Ms. Rivera, 22, who has a sideline as a singer-songwriter in soul and Christian-inspirational music, had indeed performed the national anthem before a crowd of more than 20,000 at the Mets-Cardinals game in New York, accompanied by an honor guard of T.S.A. employees.

“So you hit the high note O.K.?” I asked her as she dropped my contraband knife into a container.

“I did,” she said.

As I hurried off to my boarding gate, it occurred to me that in this and my other recent experiences at airport security, I passed through without grumbling about a rude or otherwise negative experience.

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Credit...Chi Birmingham

Managing to avoid the hated body-scanner experience, and instead use the old metal detectors, is one major benefit of PreCheck. T.S.A. officials will not comment on the decline of body scanner use as a result of PreCheck. But it’s happening, since PreCheck lanes by design employ the metal detector portals rather than the body scanners.

Five years ago, the T.S.A. was planning to have body scanners replace metal detectors at all 2,000 security checkpoints nationally. That didn’t happen, partly because of fierce controversy over health and privacy concerns that forced the agency to ditch nearly 200 body-scanner models that used a radiation-emitting technology. Still, about 700 body scanners using less invasive radio wave technology remained at checkpoints at the end of 2013 — even as the PreCheck initiative was rapidly growing.

Another big objection to the body scanners — which are meant to show all objects, not just metal — is that passengers need to remove everything from their pockets, enter a booth and stand at attention, arms raised, while the electronic scanner whirs over their bodies. Whatever the effectiveness of the body scanners (and some security experts claim they aren’t especially effective), the process can be antagonistic as screeners bark orders telling passengers how to pose.

My wife, who is also a PreCheck member, was recently waved into a metal-detector lane beside a body scanner at a checkpoint at Kennedy Airport in New York.

“I don’t have to go through the perp machine?” she asked the T.S.A. officer.

“The perp machine?” he said.

“Everybody calls it that because you pose like a perp under arrest,” she said.

Whatever they’re called, avoiding them makes for a more pleasant and arguably a more effective security process. So from my perspective, that’s a big accomplishment of PreCheck.

The T.S.A. now operates PreCheck lanes at 118 airports and is expanding the program “to more locations to enable many more passengers across the country to experience expedited screening,” said Ross Feinstein, a spokesman. There are several ways to qualify for PreCheck. One way is membership in the federal Global Entry program ($100 for five years) that provides expedited re-entry for eligible passengers returning to the United States from abroad. Another way is to be cleared for eligibility at PreCheck enrollment centers ($85 for five years) now open at 17 airports. The T.S.A. plans to have 300 PreCheck application centers open by the end of 2014.

With more than 60,000 employees and a proposed budget of $7.3 billion for the coming fiscal year, the T.S.A. is a huge government bureaucracy that has taken a lot of well-deserved criticism over the years — including in this column.

But at least for those eligible for PreCheck, the agency seems to be hitting the high notes these days.

Email: jsharkey@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Something to Sing About, Finally, at Airport Security. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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