Why I Renewed TSA PreCheck

by Robert McGarvey

Call me a travel optimist. Last Saturday, after thinking on the matter for a few days, I renewed TSA Precheck despite having not been on a plane in six months. But I wanted to see how the process worked – smooth? bumpy? – and I also have started a new project that may require cross-country flights and for that I wanted to know I had Precheck in hand.

Besides, I had no money to lose. Amex Plat will pick up the cost.

Know this: it took just a couple minutes to fill in the forms online and within four hours I had a notification that it was being renewed. No need for an appearance in person.

None of my identifying facts had changed in four and one-half years: same address, same name, same cellphone number, even the same credit card. So there was nothing to trigger curiosity about me. But, still, I have to say: the process is smooth.

Covid-19 makes PreCheck more useful, too, according to reporting in the Washington Post: “What we have seen is that wait times in general are in the neighborhood of five minutes or less, and PreCheck can go even quicker,” Lisa Farbstein, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, told Wapo.

Additionally, with PreCheck, you don’t have to touch and remove a bunch of things such as your shoes, a light jacket, and most electronics (which can go through the inspection tucked inside your bag).

That makes PreCheck a terrific buy at the price I pay.

Now, why do I think I will be flying more soon? Of course it’s not just the project I mentioned, it’s my own readiness to consider air travel mainly because the vaccines that are speeding down the pike are plenty to raise confidence.

According to a New York Times widget that predicts when a person will get the vaccine – it asks age, residence, pre-existing conditions – 118 million of my fellow Americans are ahead of me but a good guess is that I will be vaccinated by mid year. I will probably get it then, too, because there will be plenty of arms injected before mine and that will raise my confidence in the drugs.

Besides, I may already have some degree of immunity because I had the disease last March, which was corroborated by a June antibody test. I am not banking on that immunity but the probability that I have some lets me stay relaxed with 118 million in front of me. Others may need it sooner, let them have it.

Then, too, as s many as one-third of us are saying nothing doing, they say they will refuse the vaccine. I imagine that number will dip as (and if) we see vaccinations are proceeding with few significant side-effects. But the line may move even faster than some think if there are plenty of anti-vaxxers.

Remember, too, that in 1955, as the US speeded to inoculate the nation’s children against polio, there was the so-called Cutter Incident, named after the lab that produced bad doses, which resulted in some 250 cases of polio. That is, the vaccine caused the very disease it was intended to prevent,

Yes, that number of cases was small but it was large for those who were crippled and their images haunted many leading edge Baby Boomers. The images persist today.

My other concern is that the vaccines in the final stages of approval require multiple doses, delivered at rather specific time intervals, and the drugs also require extremely cold storage. We shall see how good we as a people are at remembering to go for the follow up shot and we shall also see how good pharmacies, physicians’ offices, and hospitals are at cold storage. A lot of moving parts are involved in delivering something that looks like a national immunity.

We will get all that sorted. I cannot say by when. But we will.

And we will be flying again. Probably not as much as before – I believe the predictions that business travel will be down by one-third for some years to come – but we will fly again.

Are you ready? You know I am. The Precheck renewal proves it.