The Air Traveler’s Guide to Saving Time in Airport Security Lines
June 24, 2006. It is an established fact that most guests of vacation rental homes, cottages, cabins, and condos drive to their destinations. However, this is not the case for those who vacation in such places as the VacationRental.org listings in Maui, the Caribbean, or Mexico. For them air travel is the only option.
For those who fly a recent article in USA Today by Thomas Frank is a keeper. He points out the wide disparity in waiting times among US airports. For example, passengers at Kahului Airport in Maui, Hawaii, breezed through some of the fastest security lines in the nation last year, while Orlando travelers stood in lines that exceeded federal waiting-time goals every day. On three days in April 2005, waits were more than 50 minutes.
Among the findings of a USA TODAY analysis of TSA data from 80 major airports are the following:
“• Passengers moved through security lines in 10 minutes — the TSA's goal — 92% of the time in a 19-week period from Dec. 15, 2005, through April 30. But that is slightly worse than the same period a year earlier.
• Morning rush hours are less efficient. Airports met the 10-minute goal only 83% of the time, slightly down from the year before, and only 74% of the time at 6:30 a.m. Monday, the busiest period.
• Waits on security lines continue to vary widely from airport to airport and within airports from checkpoint to checkpoint.
Passengers at major airports such as Atlanta, Denver and Newark, N.J., regularly wait in line 20 minutes or more.�
The feature of this article that you may wish to keep is a graphic that shows the security wating times at the 100 busiest airports in the US. With this in hand, you are better prepared to plan any vacation that includes flying.
