Another week, another airline has a meltdown with delayed and canceled flights.
Well, that may not be 100% true, but between staffing shortages, weather, maintenance and what have you, and then having to recover from the same, well, it seems as if airlines are having more and more problems.
It’s not just airlines though. Airports can have their own delays, as well.
The TSA maintains a list of wait times at the security checkpoints at airports across the country – you can check the wait times via the MyTSA app. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) also keeps tabs on how long the wait is for incoming passengers at the passport control areas of international airports.
So it didn’t take long for someone to see which airports get people through those queues fast and which ones…don’t.
Bounce, a luggage storage app, dug in with both hands to figure out which airports were quick to get people through and which seemed to take forever. Spoiler: the longest waits were upwards of 14 times as long as their corresponding shortest waits.
The data is published for each hour of the day and day of the week, so they took an average for each airport, looking at flights between March 8th, 2021, and March 7th, 2022.
Note that all wait times are estimates and may not be indicative of any individual’s experiences. They also don’t take TSA Pre-Check, CLEAR or Global Passport into consideration – the time measurements were all “the regular lines.”
Longest Wait Times at TSA Security Checkpoint
3. San Francisco International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 27 minutes, 48 seconds
2. St. Louis Lambert International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 28 minutes, 48 seconds
1. Palm Beach International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 36 minutes, 18 seconds
Shortest Wait Times at TSA Security Checkpoint
3. Four-way tie:
Sacramento International Airport
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport
San Antonio International Airport
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 8 minutes, 18 seconds
2. Ontario International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 6 minutes, 18 seconds
1. Newark Liberty International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 5 minutes, 18 seconds
Longest Wait Times at Passport Control
3. O’Hare International Airport
Avg. wait time: 20 minutes, 8 seconds
2. Miami International Airport
Avg. wait time: 22 minutes, 3 seconds
1. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport
Avg. wait time: 28 minutes, 23 seconds
Shortest Wait Times at Passport Control
3. Raleigh-Durham International Airport
Avg. wait time: 6 minutes, 3 seconds
2. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport
Avg. wait time: 5 minutes, 46 seconds
1. Palm Beach International Airport
Avg. wait time: 2 minutes, 24 seconds
Longest Overall Wait Times
3. San Francisco International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 27 minutes, 48 seconds
Avg. passport control wait time: 18 minutes, 8 seconds
Combined wait: 45 minutes, 56 seconds
2. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 18 minutes, 18 seconds
Avg. passport control wait time: 28 minutes, 23 seconds
Combined wait: 46 minutes, 41 seconds
1. Miami International Airport –
Avg. security wait time: 24 minutes, 54 seconds
Avg. passport control wait time: 22 minutes, 3 seconds
Combined wait: 46 minutes, 57 seconds
Shortest Overall Wait Times
3. Charlotte Douglas International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 9 minutes, 54 seconds
Avg. passport control wait time: 9 minutes, 21 seconds
Combined wait: 19 minutes, 15 seconds
2. Baltimore/Washington International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 10 minutes, 12 seconds
Avg. passport control wait time: 9 minutes, 2 seconds
Combined wait: 19 minutes, 14 seconds
1. Raleigh-Durham International Airport
Avg. security wait time: 10 minutes, 6 seconds
Avg. passport control wait time: 6 minutes, 3 seconds
Combined wait: 16 minutes, 9 seconds
You can go to this page of Bounce’s website to see the full results.
Of course, you can use the aforementioned TSA PreCheck or CLEAR to get you through the TSA checkpoint queue faster. At some airports, you also have this other option to allow you to skip part of the line, no membership required, and it’s free or cheap! And, of course, Global Entry is an option to get you through the queues faster. Best of all, you don’t even have to be an American to get any of those memberships.
Feature Photo (cropped): scottbeale.org / laughingsquid.com
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2 comments
How is ATL not on this list – at least for the TSA? On my last 3 exits from there (within the last year, mind you), I’ve waited from 45 to 90 minutes in PRE-CHECK. Almost missed my flight the first time. And, my last visit there in late February, I actually used CLEAR and it still took 45 minutes to clear TSA. Making matters worse is that the TSA personnel in ATL couldn’t be bothered to give a crap.
How this pit didn’t make the list is beyond me. Worse than SFO (which is bad).
Another example of possibly misleading numbers. I think the wait times may more accurately reality if we were provided with the number of passengers involved in those categories. I would assume that there are significantly more international passengers at San Francisco than Palm Beach. Additionally, the airport itself does not control how many officials are assigned to passport control, so if SFO has two 777s and a 350 land at approximately the same time, one would expect a longer wait period than, for example, Palm Beach, where I could only find Air Canada (from Montreal and Toronto) and Bahamasair as being international carriers.
Perhaps an example of making accurate statistics provide an inaccurate picture.