Why airport security chaos in U.S. could affect your travel plans
Efforts to speed up massive security lines will be tested this Memorial Day Weekend
Lauren LaMarca and her three girlfriends left for New York City's LaGuardia Airport about 4½ hours before their flight was scheduled for takeoff to Toronto.
They'd seen the photos circulating on social media and the reports dominating the nightly news: nightmarish security lineups filled with comatose families waiting to reach their security checkpoint.
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"We were expecting the worst, we thought it'd take forever to get through security. And LaGuardia is always pretty nuts anyway," says LaMarca. "Just got lucky, I guess, there were no problems at all."
The big arrivals board at Pearson airport in Toronto indicated flights coming out of notoriously busy hubs like LaGuardia and JFK in New York, O'Hare in Chicago and Hartsfield–Jackson in Atlanta were all running more or less on time Friday morning.
But it's been tough going lately for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, the federal department created by U.S. President George W. Bush shortly after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
An increase in air travel and cutbacks at the TSA have been a recipe for disaster.
Busy travel season
TSA expects to screen some 740 million people at U.S. airports this year, up almost 100 million from 2013, administrator Peter Neffenger said this week. The agency is simply not ready to handle the busy summer travel season, he admitted.
In a show of repentance, the TSA replaced its top security chief this week and added a group of administrators to try to speed things up at Chicago's O'Hare airport.
The moves came after scenes of chaos, including interminable lines and angry passengers, had been making waves all week leading up to Memorial Day Weekend, which is about the 30th busiest travel occasion in the U.S.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey told local media earlier this week that wait times at JFK international increased 80 per cent in March and April compared with the same time last year.
But the TSA appeared to be screening passengers more efficiently on Friday. Passengers landing at Pearson airport from some of the most hectic airports in the U.S. told CBC News lines seemed to be moving fairly quickly.
For example, all 16 security checkpoints at Atlanta's international airport were open today, and some concessions were made to speed up the security process, such as allowing passengers to keep their shoes and belts on.
'Godforsaken mess'
It's an encouraging sign given the chaos of recent weeks. On May 15, for example, more than 400 American Airlines passengers in Chicago missed their flights in one day, after waiting nearly three hours in a security lineup.
A shortage of qualified TSA workers and an upswing in travel have created a very difficult scenario for the TSA. Sometimes wait times can exceed three hours, especially in busy hubs like O'Hare airport, where the average wait time during peak hours is 42 minutes, according to the TSA.
Rick Corriggan and his wife Linda, both from Kingston, Ont., were in Chicago for their nephew's graduation and a little vacation.
"It kind of weighed over us, during the trip, that the trip back would be such a godforsaken mess," Corriggan says with a laugh. "But it turned out OK, everything considered."
The TSA is looking to boost its ranks with new employees and is also considering real-time line data so travellers can make more informed decisions about arrival times and also to automate the system used to shuffle bins through X-ray machines at security checkpoints.
Airport 'zen mode'
Officials at Pearson admit they need to make improvements as well.
"While we haven't resorted to the same tactics as our U.S. counterparts, we hear from passengers that this is a major source of frustration and it will only increase as we head into our very busy summer travel season," Pearson spokeswoman Siobhan Desroches told CBC in an email.
"While airports like Heathrow or Hong Kong are processing 95% of passengers in five minutes or less, in Canada 85 per cent of passengers are screened within 15 minutes. For Toronto Pearson, that means 2.6 million passengers waited on average longer than 15 minutes. At peak times, the wait times can be even longer."
If you do get stuck, travel writer Nikki Baylay says the key is just "enter an airport zen mode and understand, and accept, that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it."
The TSA's Neffenger says the agency is doing everything it can to ramp up for the busy summer travel season.
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