For air travelers hoping to get a sense of what major airports are like this weekend, confusion still reigns.
Some major hubs in Houston, Baltimore and New York City were clogged by hourslong security lines on Friday. Other airports, including in Los Angeles, Miami and Minneapolis, appeared to be doing fine.
Wait times varied not only from one airport to the next, but also from one hour to the next: Major hubs tend to be particularly busy in the mornings, as well as on Fridays and Sundays. Some airports’ trackers did not always appear to be a reliable gauge of the most up-to-date information on wait times, and some did not provide times at all.
A partial government shutdown, now lasting nearly six weeks, has crippled airports by requiring Transportation Security Administration employees to work without paychecks, leading to more than 3,000 work call-outs per day that have turned terminal security lines in some places into interminable slogs. (Those workers will receive back pay for the time once the shutdown ends.) And more than 480 T.S.A. workers have left the agency altogether, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were sent to more than a dozen major airports beginning this week, federal officials said, to help the understaffed T.S.A. teams. But at some airports on Friday, the wait times were still around the highest they had been in years.
Things have been especially bad at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, where the security lines on Friday morning zigzagged through two floors of the airport, around the baggage carousels and outside the international terminal. Inside the security area, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, appeared to be checking passengers’ IDs alongside T.S.A. agents. The rate of T.S.A. call-outs at the airport the previous day (the latest information available) was 44.4 percent, the highest rate in the nation.
David Bailey, 38, an anesthesiologist from London, had been stuck in Houston since Thursday, when he tried unsuccessfully to catch a connecting flight to Costa Rica. “Our view of the U.S. is already dim and at an all-time low, and this situation certainly gives the impression that the system is broken,” he said on Friday.
He used survivalist strategies to endure the line. “We’re trying to drink enough water so that we don’t faint,” he said, “but not so much that you have to use the toilet.”
Thuy Le, 33, a Houston-based data analyst, was traveling with her husband, Nam Nguyen, 41, and their 3-year-old son, Levi, on Friday from Houston to Knoxville, Tenn., for a graduation ceremony. They arrived at 10 a.m. for a 3 p.m. flight. “This is just too chaotic and stressful,” she said.
Waiting in line with a 3-year-old proved particularly challenging. “He’s been singing every song he knows,” she said, “but he’s running out of songs.” She laughed, prompting Levi to swing his blanket in the air and retort, “It’s not funny!”
“He’s right, it’s not funny,” she said.
On Friday afternoon, a memorandum from President Trump directed that T.S.A. employees be paid, though it was not clear when that move would begin to affect the staffing levels. The Department of Homeland Security said that T.S.A. officers should begin receiving paychecks as early as Monday.
At LaGuardia Airport in New York on Friday morning, the security line snaked around the lobby in Terminal B, and it took two hours for passengers to make it through general security around 7 a.m. Some looked miserable; others looked panicked. Two ICE agents stood in the lobby, watching the lines.
At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport, lines were daunting in the morning but had eased by midday. Around noon, at least three lanes were open in the main security checkpoint, allowing travelers to move through the lines in about 20 to 30 minutes. Still, the airport’s website advised passengers to allow at least four hours for domestic and international screenings. One passenger in line remarked to another that he thought the long lines were a social media hoax.
There was no hoax in Baltimore, where in the afternoon one line snaked well outside the airport. Jason Foland, who was traveling with family members to Boston, had been waiting for 45 minutes and said he had been told that he had at least another two hours to go before reaching the T.S.A. checkpoint.
Many passengers heeded the advice of airports, only to run into other complications. James Kyle, 65, showed up at the Atlanta airport at 12:30 p.m. on Friday for a 7:20 p.m. flight, because he said the lines for his trip last Sunday were a nightmare. But when he arrived on Friday, he was not allowed to check his bags more than four hours before his departure. The rules can vary by airport and by airline.
“I’m caught in a Catch-22,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Gabe Castro-Root, Christine Chung and Emma G. Fitzsimmons in New York, and Donna M. Owens in Baltimore.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics across the country.
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