Las Vegans train to be Transportation Security Administration officers

Detecting a security threat isn’t always easy.

Just ask Joe Curila. The 66-year-old Army veteran from Las Vegas failed his first test as an officer trainee for the Transportation Security Administration.

Curila was prohibited from disclosing what the exam entailed. But with some guidance from his instructors, all of whom are longtime TSA officers, Curila passed the exam on his second try and learned to study harder.

“It’s tough training and it’s not that easy,” Curila said. “If I failed a second time, I’d be out of here. That’s how tough it is.”

Curila is among a class of 72 Las Vegas-area residents undergoing rigorous, paid training to become a TSA security officer. The intense testing is aimed at teaching the trainees to quickly and thoroughly screen roughly 62,000 airline passengers daily and keep the security lines moving at McCarran International Airport.

To help out, another 150 part-time TSA officers based in Las Vegas are now working full time, TSA officials said.

The move comes after a recent $34 million allocation by Congress to hire 768 new TSA officers nationwide to address long security lines at airports and an anticipated increase in airline travel this summer. An estimated 231.1 million airline passengers are expected to board flights in the United States through Aug. 31, a 4 percent jump from the previous high last summer, according to the trade group Airlines for America.

Along with increased traffic, some of the airport security delays in recent months stem from random security checks and visible security patrols ordered by the TSA following terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels.

“You can’t make things happen if you don’t have the resources,” Karen Burke, the TSA’s federal security director in Nevada, said during a recent interview at McCarran International Airport.

“We know terrorists are going after aviation, so we’ve been doing training with our officers so that they will be able to quickly detect anything that could be a threat,” Burke said. “We look at getting that right balance between a worker that has the aptitude to do a technical job, but has the personality to interface with people all the time.”

Security lines at McCarran International typically average 13 minutes, but especially large crowds have led to waits lasting up to 20 minutes in some areas of the airport.

In 2015, the TSA screened 20 million travelers coming into Las Vegas, along with 14 million checked bags.

“Las Vegas is different because there are so many unique events and conventions happening in town, so we have to look at everything that’s going on, prepare our staff and adjust the operations if we need to,” Burke said.

The TSA officer trainees finished four weeks of classroom instruction on Friday, covering passenger pat-downs, spotting suspicious items on an X-ray machine, bag searches and how to identify potentially threatening behavior from travelers.

Beginning Monday, the class will get to apply its new skills at the nation’s ninth-busiest airport. They will start 100 hours of hands-on training with body scanners, metal detectors and interactions with airline passengers.

“If the average person knew what kind of training we have to go through, I think they would understand why the TSA is in place to make them more secure,” TSA officer candidate Karen Leliefeld, 49, of Las Vegas said.

One way travelers can spot the newbies: all trainees wear the familiar royal blue shirts, void of the TSA patches and gold badge that make them official. The students range in age from 26 to 66; all of them applied for the job online to seek a new career path. Women compose about 40 percent of the class.

Their collective goal is to keep anything — or anyone — dubious from getting past McCarran’s 46 screening lanes spread across four security checkpoints.

After the on-site airport training, the 72 new recruits will be tested again, to ensure that they retained all the new information. Three failures on the final exam, and they’re out of the program.

If they pass, the students will each earn a starting wage of $17 per hour and join about 1,100 other TSA officers working in Las Vegas.

“They’re not sending us out there if we don’t know what we’re doing, because our job is to protect the country’s aviation industry,” said Thomas Bartolin, a 38-year-old former law enforcement officer from Colorado now undergoing training to join the TSA in Las Vegas.

“I’m very comfortable doing this job,” Bartolin said. “The only thing I would worry about is that I apply all of my training correctly and being the best I can be.”

Contact Art Marroquin at amarroquin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0336. Find @AMarroquin_LV on Twitter.