Eight-year TSA sustainment award puts checkpoint uptime on the hook

In a follow-on TSA sustainment award announced January 23, 2025, Leidos will maintain more than 12,000 units of Transportation Security Equipment across 430-plus U.S. airport locations under a contract valued up to $2.6 billion, making availability, sparing and field response—not shiny features—the real battleground for security leaders.

What changed and why it matters now

Air travel volume has rebounded, lanes are tighter, and tolerance for outages is near zero. A deal of this size turns sustainment into the main event: if your AITs, X-ray lanes, ETDs and CAT units aren’t up when peak waves hit, you pay in overtime, lost throughput and incident risk. The headline is dollars, but the day-to-day deliverable is disciplined operational availability with predictable mean time to repair.

The company’s position

“As air travel volume continues to grow, ensuring fast and frictionless TSA checkpoints will only become more important,” said Roy Stevens, president, National Security Sector, Leidos. “Leidos will draw on our decades of expertise in predictive analytics, cybersecurity, and logistics to continue to provide exceptional mission support to TSA.” Leidos provides security detection, automation and mission logistics services for aviation and homeland customers, which makes the company directly relevant here because the work is about keeping checkpoint systems operable, patched and supported at scale.

Theme: availability beats features

Features don’t move patrons if a lane is dark. What buyers and operators should extract from this award is a simple hierarchy: parts on hand, techs on time, remote diagnostics that actually resolve faults, and analytics that predict failures before they strand a shift. If your KPI deck still celebrates theoretical max throughput without tracking alert rates, spare-pool health, and median time-to-clear per failure class, you’re not managing risk—you’re measuring marketing.

The operational tradeoffs you own

Higher sensitivity settings can raise nuisance alarms that cascade into secondary checks; lower sensitivity risks misses that escalate liability. Sustainers can tune and advise, but your post orders decide which risk you accept on which shift. Put numbers on it: lane availability target by device type, alert-rate threshold per thousand passengers, and SLA for fault-to-clear during peak waves. Then hold the contractor to repair times and hold your team to adjudication discipline.

Integration determines real speed

Sustainment that stops at “hardware up” is not enough. Field fixes must be paired with clean integrations: radios for fault codes and technician dispatch, VMS for clip retrieval, ticketing for exception handling, and reporting pipelines supervisors actually read before the next push. Most “tech failures” in airports are really process failures—ambiguous fault triage, spares that live in the wrong terminal, firmware windows that collide with banked departures. Make the contractor’s logistics footprint visible to ops leads and bake those handoffs into shift briefs.

Procurement guardrails and path dependence

An eight-year runway creates leverage and lock-in. Use the leverage early. Tie fees to measured availability, not just uptime; require quarterly red-team drills that validate weapon-detection baselines after major firmware changes; demand data export so you’re not trapped in dashboards that can’t answer audit questions. Plan a midterm competitive check—if only on analytics and repair KPIs—to keep pressure on continuous improvement without blowing up the program.

What to watch next

If the sustainment model works, you should see fewer unscheduled lane drops at peak, faster fault-to-clear times, alert rates that trend down without sensitivity backslides, and technician arrival times that match SLA in the hardest windows. If that isn’t visible within a quarter, the contract is a paper win and an operational loss.

The score isn’t the contract value. It’s predictable, safe throughput when your concourses are full.