Company Clear offers way around long airport lines in Las Vegas

If you’re hustling to catch a flight and there’s a mile-long line of people inching toward the TSA screeners, who wouldn’t want to cut in front?

For $179 per year, the company Clear offers that in Las Vegas and other cities – a fingerprint or iris scan, coupled with a boarding pass, lets you walk straight to the physical screening.

The product has bounced back from a rocky start.

According to a report this year by The Wall Street Journal, founder Steven Brill launched Clear in 2006 because he was frustrated that the Transportation Security Administration, formed two months after the 9/11 terror attacks, put all travelers “through the same screening process even though some people were willing to undergo background checks for expedited screening.”

But Clear’s parent company “won over few airports and few customers” and went bankrupt in 2009, the Journal reported. Clear’s current chief executive, Caryn Seidman-Becker, acquired the business out of bankruptcy in 2010.

Clear operates in 16 U.S. airports today, including McCarran International Airport, where it opened in 2014.

It had 165,000 customers when it shut down in 2009, the Journal reported at the time. Today, the company says it has more than 600,000 customers.