Source: USA Today
Author: Thomas Frank

For the first six months of last year, John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Calif., was a traveler's tar pit.

Security lines were so backed up that on 281 separate occasions, passengers waited for at least 40 minutes before reaching the metal detectors, government records show. Waits of an hour or more were recorded 44 times.

"Our lines were wrapped around and through the lobby," says Courtney Wiercioch, airport deputy director.

Then, in late June, the airport added eight security lanes at a cost of $4.5 million. The new lanes doubled the number of checkpoints. The long lines virtually ceased. A wait of 40 minutes or more was recorded only four times during the next nine months, records show.

The situation in Orange County illustrates two seemingly incompatible trends since early 2004: a growing number of air travelers and a declining number of extremely long security lines. Travel during the first two months of 2005 is up about 6% compared with the first two months of last year. But the number of extreme security backups — those with 40-minute-or-more waits — has fallen dramatically in the first three months of this year. The decline has been more striking because the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which runs security checkpoints, hasn't hired more screeners. (Related item: Fliers spend less time in line)

Still, with the TSA's staffing levels frozen by Congress, some worry the trend will reverse.

"The extreme wait times have gotten better, but there's a concern we could experience an increase in wait times as more people continue to fly," says Jack Evans, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, an airline trade group.

Christopher Bidwell, the association's security director, says long checkpoint lines have led airlines to hold flights for delayed passengers. The line problem has eased, Bidwell says, "but I don't think it's completely resolved."

Cutting corners?

Aviation security consultant Douglas Laird worries that the TSA may be too focused on moving travelers through security quickly. He says he has seen screeners at backed-up checkpoints rush through security procedures by running handheld metal detectors only to passengers' knees instead of to their ankles.

"It has to weigh on somebody when every time you look up, as far as you can see there's people," says Laird, former security chief at Northwest Airlines.

Screener Cris Soulia in San Diego agrees that some screeners "tend to cut corners" when they see lines growing. But screener A.J. Castilla says that doesn't happen at Boston's Logan International Airport, where the security director "repeatedly tells us, 'don't rush.' "

The TSA also has concerns about long lines. Earlier this year, the agency told the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, that large crowds in airport lobbies are "a potential target for terrorists."

The TSA began taking hourly timings of security lines at all airports in June. (At some airports, such as John Wayne, timing started in January 2004.) Airport security directors must notify agency headquarters as soon as a wait time reaches 40 minutes. "It allows us to dig in to identify a problem," says the TSA's chief operating officer, Jonathan Fleming.

He blames many long lines on "anomalies," such as broken screening equipment, airport evacuations and flight schedules that overwhelm a checkpoint. If the TSA isn't expecting a passenger surge and gets caught with too few screeners at a checkpoint, "it could be our fault, too," Fleming says.

A USA TODAY analysis of the 4.4 million wait times recorded from June 1 to March 31 shows a correlation between long lines and passenger volume. Airports with chronic line problems are often operating at or near capacity:

• Six large airports — Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix and Reagan National near Washington — accounted for 41% of the worst waits. Twenty-five airports accounted for 78% of the longest waits.

Los Angeles International had two-thirds more long lines than second-place Reagan National. LAX spokeswoman Nancy Castles says the airport "has more checked luggage and passengers to screen than any other airport."

In March, midsize Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers had 26 lines where waits lasted longer than 40 minutes -more than twice as many as any airport that month — as vacationers packed the airport beyond capacity.

"We did a million passengers in March in a terminal designed to do about 350,000 passengers a month," says Susan Sanders, a spokeswoman for the airport, which is expanding.

• The number of extreme waits varied by day. Mondays, when travel is heavy, were the worst. Nationwide during the 10-month period, 379 waits of 40 minutes or longer were recorded on Mondays.

• The Monday after Thanksgiving had the most number of waits 40 minutes or longer: 12 airports recorded a total of 46. Three of the four checkpoints at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport were jammed all morning, accounting for eight long waits, records show.

Phoenix aviation director David Krietor offers an explanation for long lines: "You either don't have the lane capacity, or you don't have the staffing for the lanes that are built."

When the airport added four checkpoints in early March, the TSA set up screener teams that move to the busiest checkpoints. Still, the TSA has made no promise to add screeners for security lanes the airport plans to add. "We know we're going to be in a customer-service meltdown if we don't have that capacity and they're not properly staffed," Krietor says.

'Marked improvement'

Airports and the TSA have been resourceful to expedite screening. Travelers in some airports are urged to take metal items out of their pockets while waiting. The TSA sometimes shuttles passengers in long lines to less-busy checkpoints.

Stephen Van Beek, policy director for the Airports Council International, says the TSA must do more. Most security backups result from "inadequate TSA workforce levels and the difficulty of getting the right number of screeners to the right checkpoint at the right time," he says.

Even so, frequent flyer Jim Zipursky, an investment banker from Omaha, says he has seen "a marked improvement in the last 18 months. I think the TSA is getting their rhythm down."