As federal and city officials continue to struggle over how to ease chronic security delays at Midway Airport, another Monday morning crush left thousands of grumbling travelers waiting in a security line that stretched more than 500 feet to the parking garage.
“I’m furious. I fly all over the country,” said Joe Clarken, 38, who waited for an hour at the ticket counter for his boarding pass to Phoenix and another hour to clear the metal detectors. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen, anywhere. It’s an absolute joke.”
At its most congested at 7 a.m. Monday, about 1,000 travelers stacked up at the bottleneck to the 10-lane security checkpoint. Four airlines held their jets at the gate for up to 39 minutes so passengers could make flights.
At Southwest Airlines, 17 of the day’s first 36 flights did not leave on time due to security checkpoint delays, including nine of the first 12, said spokeswoman Christine Turneabe-Connelly.
Federal officials even blocked the stairs and turned off escalators from the upper-level ticket counter to slow the influx of passengers into the line that crossed the lone pedestrian bridge leading from the terminal to the gates.
Some frequent fliers said they arrived four hours early for their flights Monday morning, a peak time for business travel. Vacation traffic and passengers stranded by Sunday’s thunderstorms made the throng worse than usual, but not by much, said veteran travelers and airport police.
The city plans to add an 11th metal detector lane by the end of the week, but officials said last week a more permanent fix–adding two more passenger bridges–is at least two years away.
The U.S. transportation secretary has set a goal of moving passengers through security within 10 minutes. Last week city and federal officials blamed each other for Midway’s delays, the city saying there were not enough federal screeners, while the federal security head of Midway was saying more screeners would not increase efficiency at the single checkpoint.
The 11th lane, and a 12th that the city hopes to build in the next six to 12 months, are short-term measures intended to tide Midway over until planned construction of two additional pedestrian bridges over Cicero Avenue. Funding for the new bridges, estimated to cost more than $40 million, is up in the air.
The Southwest Side airport, which has seen an 11 percent increase in passengers this year due to the surging popularity of such low-fare airlines as Southwest and ATA, is still about a year from completion of an $800 million overhaul that will add 12 aircraft gates to the existing 31.
“The mayor’s got his hands full here,” said Dana Bertogli, 46, of Evanston, traveling on business to Dallas. “They built it, and they built a nice airport–just pre-9/11.”
Passengers fed up
In the meantime, passengers are fed up, saying they haven’t seen such delays since just after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Airline executives say they’re losing business. One in four flights takes off late at Midway, according to federal statistics, ranking it 30th for on-time departures out of 31 large hub airports during the first five months of the year.
As travelers arrived Monday morning, they shook their heads in disbelief. Then came the sighs. Finally, an outpouring of adjectives:
“Ridiculous.” ” Unbelievable.” “Insane.” “Pathetic.” “Crazy.” “Stupid.”
“It’s absolutely horrible,” said Jim Burrows, 45, of Plainfield, as he waited in the screening line 10 minutes after his flight to Denver was scheduled to depart. Despite travelers’ pleas, security personnel would not let passengers skip ahead in the line even if their flights were about to take off. “I have a lot of people who’ve already missed their flight,” one federal screener told Burrows.
Other travelers complained of a lack of responsiveness from airport personnel.
“There is nobody to guide us properly, to help us,” said a software engineer trying to make a flight home to San Jose, Calif. As she explained the confusion that caused her to wait half an hour in the wrong ticket counter line, officials announced the final boarding call for her flight. She was still 15 minutes from the security checkpoint.
“What am I supposed to do? My bags have been checked. My family is waiting.”
Security officials blamed the delay in part on the unusually large number of passengers changing their tickets at the last minute because of the weekend weather, and on the airlines canceling flights.
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The booking changes triggered the government’s passenger-profiling system to require additional screening for those passengers, bogging down the screening process, a source said. The problem of flights departing late then snowballed to other airports around the country.
Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Chris Rhatigan described the weekend weather’s impact on Monday’s travelers as “like winter in August. People expect delays in Chicago in the winter, not now,” she said.
But Monique Bond, spokeswoman for the city’s Aviation Department, said the federal agency should plan to bring in more staff following inclement weather, which can happen any time of year in Chicago.
“They haven’t really had the experience or opportunity to go through an entire season of Chicago,” she said of the agency, which was created following the Sept. 11 attacks but did not staff airports immediately.
She said the agency hires extra screeners for holidays such as Memorial Day weekend. The Friday before that busy holiday, 62,000 passengers at Midway waited just 35 minutes at the longest, she said. “Certainly more staff would be one of the solutions” to the recurring security delays, she said.
Before Sept. 11, Midway had just six screening lanes, which handled a then-industry standard of 600 passengers an hour each, Bond said. Since then, federal screeners nationwide average about 200 passengers an hour, she said, but Midway, which serves an average of 47,000 passengers per weekday, is processing only about 170 an hour.
Until the proposed bridges are erected, passengers traveling at peak traffic times have little choice but to arrive hours in advance.
Earlier safe than sorry
“I’d rather lose sleep to be here early than sweat it out,” said Falana Skinner, 25, who left Benton Harbor, Mich., at 5 a.m. to arrive at Midway four hours before her 11 a.m. flight to Nashville.
Other passengers Monday vowed never to fly again, or at least to fly from a different airport.
“I was trying to get a better rate, but from now on, I’ll spend the extra $100 and go to O’Hare,” said Steve Tomaszewski, 45, of Hoffman Estates, who was headed to San Diego on business. “I won’t do this.”
Despite the vows, experience suggests most travelers won’t stay away.
“We’ve turned into a busy airport,” said Mary Ulrich, a Chicago police officer who has worked at Midway for two years. “It’ll only get busier over time, I’m sure of that.”