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A TSA Flightmare! Begin at the end of the line, please.
A TSA Flightmare! Begin at the end of the line, please.
"This weekend was probably the worst since spring break,'' said the rep, whose airline was forced to put out about 100 cots for stranded customers. "Our concern is the summer, which is spring break every day from June till September.'' A federal source blamed the nightmare weekend on the Transportation Security Administration's long-standing issues of too little manpower combined with a seasonal surge in air traffic. "All major hubs are sitting ducks for outrageous lines at any given moment in time,'' the source warned.
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Caught in line? Cot in airport.
Caught in line? Cot in airport.
"People were breathing heavy and freaking out,'' said Chicago resident Christina Jack, 54, who arrived from O'Hare into LaGuardia Airport in Queens on Monday. "There was a gentleman near me who started panicking and yelling, 'I'm going to miss my flight! I'm going to miss my flight!' They pulled him out and put him right up at the front of the short line. I was lucky, I missed the early-morning rush,'' she said, noting that it took her "just'' a little more than two hours to wade through security.
American and other airlines say they are hiring extra workers to do whatever they can to move things along themselves, such as using employees to run empty metal-detector bins back up to thefront of the line. The federal source said airports' wait time "depends on the changing demand of flights on any given day in these hubs. They include LaGuardia, JFK and Newark airports, which the TSA admitted last week all had increased wait times since last year. A total of around 4,000 American passengers have already missed their flights because of TSA delays since February, including 800 in the past week alone, the airline said.
Comment: US travelers take heed. We are dealing with the government here and you know how that goes: If it was bad it will get worse. Some of this is incompetence; the rest is a way to irk the public into wanting something to change...and that change will be dictated by the PTB for a specific purpose. Time will tell. We shall see.