By: Melody Warnick
Although the government has sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to airports around the country, a Virginia Tech expert on airport engineering doubts their ability to make an impact on the long lines at security checkpoints.
“TSA agents are specially trained over the course of months. ICE agents are not trained to operate magnetometers or look at the scanned pictures of passenger carry-on items, so it’s mostly a gimmick,” said Antonio Trani, a professor of transportation infrastructure and systems engineering.
Trani offers this advice to passengers facing an endless airport queue since a partial government shutdown cut off funding to the Department of Homeland Security, causing an estimated 400 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers to quit their jobs and thousands more to call in sick each day.
Monitor the situation online.
“The MyTSA app, when it’s being fed with real-time data, will give you a pretty good idea of how big the line at the airport is,” Trani said. “You can even check the wait times in specific airport terminals.” He also recommended FlightAware.com’s Misery Map, which shows airports that are currently experiencing delays. “Even on a good day,” Trani said, “LaGuardia, Newark, and JFK airports generate about 50 percent of all the delays in the system.”
Time your arrival. Airports schedule arrivals and departures in banks of flights that can spur a large influx of people. “If you check a website like FlightAware, you can gauge when the next big group of departures begins,” Trani said. “If you arrive in the trough before that big inflow of people, you may be able to be served faster.”
Choose early flights. Just because you got through security OK doesn’t mean you won’t get stuck elsewhere on your journey. “If the airlines are making an effort to accommodate folks stuck in security lines including flight crews they may depart late,”
said Trani. “That has a cascading effect for the rest of the day. The first flights of the day are less likely to be affected by the ripple effect of late departures elsewhere.”
Be patient
“Typical queues at airports are highly nonlinear. If you eliminate a few TSA personnel, the waiting times grow faster than most people realize,” he said. “It can take anywhere from 45 seconds to a minute and a half to process a person through a security checkpoint magnetometer or using advanced imaging technology. The problem is that getting to the security checkpoint may take hours if the number of servers is insufficient. You don’t want to compromise security by checking people in faster just because you have a long line. Even if TSA funding gets restored tomorrow, it will take a while to restore normalcy. The problem is really, really bad.”
