The TSA says the amount of people sneaking past security is a 'larger number than we realized'

• Hundreds of people have breached parts of airport security since March 2023, the TSA told The Washington Post.
• That's a massive uptick over 2022, and the agency told The Washington Post it wants to crack down.

Ever wished you could skip the line at the airport?

It turns out 300 people since March 2023 have managed to get close by slipping by parts of TSA security checkpoints.

"It is a larger number than we realized," Transportation Security Administration spokesperson R. Carter Langston told The Washington Post in a new interview.

The stat marks a massive uptick over previous years; there were just 29 airport security breaches in 2019 and 72 in 2022, the agency told the Post.

Langston said the breaches were a "trend" the TSA wants to crack down on. That said, the "vast majority" of breaches "do not seem to have evil intent," he told the Post, with most resulting from accidents, impatience, or people looking for misplaced items.

In more than 200 breaches last year, people re-entered one-way exits, while in 80, people evaded travel document checkers, according to the Post. In those 80 instances, all passengers were still screened by a metal detector or body scanner, Langston said.

The Post noted that multiple incidents in recent months corroborate the new TSA figures.

In February, a passenger walked through an unstaffed body scanner. In a separate incident that same month, another flyer bypassed ID checks and flew to Los Angeles without a ticket. She was detained by the FBI upon her arrival but not charged, according to the Post.

The TSA told Business Insider that it screens 850 million passengers each year, and just 1 in every 11 million passengers tries to get past the TSA.

The agency is testing new ways to stem security breaches, the outlet reported, including solid plastic or glass barriers in place of the nylon belts popularly used as line dividers, as well as one-way gates that close behind travelers when they pass.

In order to improve the passenger experience, the TSA said in March it would test self-checkout style security screenings at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas — but only for TSA PreCheck passengers.

Correction: April 5, 2024 — A previous version of this story cited a quote in The Washington Post by a TSA spokesperson that was incorrect. The spokesperson said the hundreds of people who bypassed parts of security checkpoints were a "larger number" than the agency thought, not a "larger problem."

The story has also been updated with a statement from the TSA about how many passengers it screens each year.