You can pay for TSA PreCheck to keep your shoes on when you walk through airport security, but what about the rest of us who don’t particularly enjoy the indignity of slipping a sock or — eek! — bare heels along a floor that has had thousands of other shoes and feet scraped across it.
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To speed up the process and lower the ick factor, the Transportation Security Administration is at CES 2025 in Las Vegas showing off new technology that will let you keep your shoes on while your shoes are scanned for prohibited items.
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The premise is simple: You step onto the platform, placing each foot in a marked area. Millimeter wave technology scans your shoe and sends data to a computer. When CNET’s Bridget Carey spotted the technology being demonstrated, she knew she had to change things up and see how the TSA’s new technology would respond.
“Let’s make it interesting,” Carey said. “Maybe I should put something in my shoe and see what happens in the scanner machine.”
Carey stuffed a variety of small objects, including a floss tip, a worm, a mustard packet and a plastic knife, into her shoe before stepping onto the TSA scanning platform.
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Shoes have been a problem at the airport for more than two decades. In December 2001, Richard Reid tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with homemade bombs hidden in his shoes. He was subdued after trying to light the fuse and no one was hurt, but in 2006, the TSA began requiring passengers to remove their shoes while going through security.
Brian Lewis of the Department of Homeland Security told Carey that if the new shoe technology is deployed at airports, checkpoint officers themselves will not review the images.
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“Everything would be driven by the automated discovery algorithm,” Lewis said. “So the officer would get a red light or a green light, basically saying, are the shoes good to go, or do we need to do further inspection?”
The machines are looking for a variety of things, Lewis said, including shoes that have been tampered with, specific material properties and other issues.
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The technology transmits the image in pieces, essentially building the picture of the shoe on the computer screen, layer by layer. One demo shoe had a metal letter “F” hidden inside, and Lewis showed Carey how the metal letter slowly materialized as pieces of the image were assembled. A scan takes only about a second and the image appears almost immediately.
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Carey’s artifact-filled shoes showed up oddly in the scan, as expected. Lewis was able to point out the spice packet and the outline of the plastic knife.
“I’m not sure I see the rubber worm, so we may need to do some additional development to be able to detect them effectively,” he said.
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When the machine scanned her shoes with no objects, she was good to go.
“As we strive to achieve a more seamless travel experience, we know that something the traveling public would like [is to] they don’t have to take off their shoes anymore,” Lewis said. “So bringing this technology to passengers is something we think they’re going to be really excited about.”
The scanner is still a prototype and data from the CES demonstration will be collected and used for further development.
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