Passengers at busy Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas can test self-screening at customs – a new system that US federal airport security officials are calling “a step into the future.”

The Transportation Security Administration checkpoint – only in Las Vegas, only for TSA PreCheck customers and only using the English language – incorporates a screen with do-it-yourself instructions telling people how to smoothly pass themselves and their carry-on luggage through pre-flight screening with little or no help from uniformed TSA officers.

“How do we step into the future? This is a step,” said a system designer, Dimitri Kusnezov, science and technology under secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security. “The interface with people makes all the difference.”

“We want to avoid passengers having to be patted down,” said John Fortune, program manager of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Screening at Speed” program and a developer with Kusnezov of the prototype.

Instead of a boxy belt-fed device using a stack of gray trays, the futuristic-looking baggage and personal belongings inspection system looks like a scaled-down starship medical magnetic resonance imaging machine. It uses an automated bin return that sanitizes trays with germ-killing ultraviolet light between users.

Travellers step into a separate clear glass body scanning booth with a video display inside showing how to stand when being sensed with what officials said is the type of “millimetre wave technology” already in use around the country. A reporter found it sensitive enough to identify a forgotten handkerchief in a pocket. He did not have to remove his shoes.

“Really, one of the main aims here is to allow individuals to get through the system without necessarily having to interact directly with an officer and … at their own pace,” said Christina Peach, a TSA administrator involved in the system design. “It’s also about not feeling rushed.”

Nationally, nearly all passengers who pay to enroll in the TSA PreCheck program pass through screening in 10 minutes or less, agency spokesman R. Carter Langston said, while regular traveller and carry-on screening takes about 30 minutes.

Peach said eight uniformed TSA officers might be needed to staff two lanes of the new system, compared with 12 officers in lanes today.

However, Kusnezov and Karen Burke, TSA federal security director in Nevada, said agents including union members would just be freed from hands-on screening to focus more attention on broader security concerns.

Officials said they’ll time how quickly travellers pass through the prototype during evaluations this year.

Testing is being done at a unique-in-the-nation “innovation checkpoint” that TSA unveiled in 2019 in a sprawling international arrivals terminal that opened in 2012 at Harry Reid airport. It already features screening lanes with instruction displays and estimated wait times.

“This change in technology is for people who want to get through a checkpoint faster,” said Keith Jeffries, a former TSA director at Los Angeles International Airport and now vice president of K2 Security Screening Group, a company that installs screening systems at shipping ports including airports. “It’ll be a great step, but I anticipate it will be for the experienced passengers.”

Jeffries compared the new system to self-checkout lanes that were introduced in the 1980s and are now common at supermarkets across the nation. He recalled that some shoppers initially avoided scanning their own purchases.

“It’s going to take time to educate the public,” he said of the TSA screening lanes. “You’re going to have a new generation of travellers that just wants to get through with the least amount of hassle and delay. I think eventually we’ll see more and more of them.”