The two siblings had come to New York for their father’s funeral. They then found themselves stuck at the city’s LaGuardia Airport.
Princess Ivie, a nursing student in Texas, and her brother, Prince Eweka, were sitting in the baggage drop-off zone Tuesday morning, waiting to reschedule their flights. Ivie had slept through the notification that her flight had been moved up by 4 hours, to 6 a.m. Eweka, who lives in Ohio and works in a restaurant, had also missed his flight — in his case, thanks to the long security line.
“I had a two-and-a-half-hour wait on the line. By the time I got halfway through, I had already missed my flight,” he said.
At airports across the country, travelers are facing hourslong security lines, stretching into parking garages, as a five-week government shutdown leaves around 47,000 TSA agents unpaid and many off the job.
The disruption deepened Sunday night, when an Air Canada plane collided with a firetruck while landing at LaGuardia, killing two pilots and forcing one of the nation’s busiest airports to shut down for hours, delaying or canceling hundreds of flights.
I went to LaGuardia’s Terminal B on Tuesday morning to get a sense of what travelers were up against. The security line looped around the terminal four times. By mid-morning, an agent told me it would take 90 minutes to reach the front of the line.
By late Tuesday, there was some optimism that a deal could be reached to end the partial government shutdown and restore the Department of Homeland Security’s funding. Congress is due to begin a two-week recess on Friday.
Multiple travelers told me they’d been stuck in limbo for days. There was a sense that traveling — never easy — shouldn’t be this hard.
Still, the Departures Hall was full of people trying to make the most of a bad situation.
“We’ll laugh about it someday,” said Pam Collins. She had just learned that her flight back home to Nashville had been canceled, and she was waiting to check in to her hotel. Her New York vacation had been a blast — a walk through Central Park, a great meal in Chinatown — but she was ready to be home. She missed her dog.
Ruth Garcia, who was visiting from El Paso, was sitting on a bench, resting her feet while her husband held her spot in the TSA line.
Next to her was Cindy Willard, who was expecting to still be at LaGuardia when Garcia landed back in Texas.
Willard’s Sunday night flight to Nashville had been canceled when the airport shut down, and she arrived at 5:30 in the morning for a rescheduled flight. That flight, and then another, had been canceled. She was hoping to get on another late-night flight, but the airline told her she’d have to wait to drop off her bags. So she was camped out on a bench with her suitcases.
Nearby, a group of 20 high school students from Boise, Idaho, had arranged themselves in small groups and were playing cards. They were part of a 200-member choir trip, all of whom were gradually flying home in groups after their original flight was canceled.
Since they were among the last from their group to leave, they’d had an extra day to explore Times Square, and a few of them went to a hockey game. But their initial excitement had faded to frustration and boredom. “Some of these kids are just really ready to go home and see their parents,” said Melanie Nelson, one of their chaperones. “A lot of teenagers, a lot of feelings.”
A few people wandered over from the arrivals terminal to upstairs to marvel at the state of the security lines and get a sense of what they were in for at the end of their trips.
“We’re going to have to be super early when we fly out,” said Angela Bruccoli, who had traveled with her daughter, Ashley, from South Carolina to celebrate Ashley’s 21st birthday. She was trying not to get upset about the long line because she had no control over it.
Mary Bruccoli, who lives in New York, chimed in with her rendition of “Let go, let God”: “Let go, let TSA.”
Staring down the long line in front of me, I worried about my future travel. I have a trip to Amsterdam booked in just a few weeks. Will the shutdown end? Will the lines abate?
Then, I got a ping from a colleague, who’d just arrived on the other side of the security line. He’d made it through in just under an hour. It seemed like a good sign.
Henry Chandonnet is a reporter on the Business News desk at Business Insider.
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