We buy our ticket from the airline but they don't get service guarantees from the airport so all the risk is passed onto their customers who can miss their flight and be held responsible for it, despite it being the airports fault.
The incentives for the airport are to be as cheap as possible, which they do by not having enough staff manning bagging/security et el for the peaks. Airports are a natural monopoly within an area so there isn't competition to loose out to, there is no where else for the planes and travellers to go and cities wont be putting down space for multiple airports to compete.
Because of the monopoly aspect it requires legal requirements for service guarantees to be laid out on the airports to fix this, without which the situation wont change and the risk will continue to lay with the customer for airport failures and they have little choice but to turn up early to mitigate the risk of the airport not having enough capacity. Its a system where all the companies are acting in their own best interest.
The airport, being, to no small extent, a shopping mall, has incentives to get you there early.
One thing that would tend to discourage frequent travelers from determining their optimal pre-flight margin would be to have somewhat arbitrary and frequently-changing security procedures and requirements. A second way to encourage long loitering times would be to under-staff vital functions such as Air Traffic Control.
> The incentives for the airport are to be as cheap as possible, which they do by not having enough staff manning bagging/security et el for the peaks
Anyone who doesn't work for the airlines at large commercial airports in the US, is very likely to be a government employee. TSA being a very large portion of that. They do not have any direct incentives to be cheap.
In large urban areas you will generally have more than one airport, so its not the monopoly you're making it out to be. Any delays caused by the airline (long lines at bag check) would also be subject to competition with the airport itself from competing airlines.
The reason you have to show up so early is because the downside of missing a flight is huge. Absolute best case you’re at a large city flying to another large and an airline, likely different from the one you planned on traveling on, can get you on their next flight within the hour. This is going to be pricy. The next best case is you’re able to get a flight out the same day but hour later maybe for free or a small up charge if it’s the same airline.
Then you also have problems on the other end. You can easily lose a whole day at your destination. That might mean the car you’re planning to rent is no longer available, the person picking you up is no longer free, you miss an connection etc.
Of course if we have one hour electric commuter flights which just turn around and go again that makes things very different. Worst case, assuming there’s seats, you’re out two hours and on the next flight. So what the article is describing is a totally different game.
This is not wasted money. The article fails to take leisure travelers and airport economics into account.
Us seasoned travelers are very comfortable being in airports and airplanes. We have no problem with getting to our gate as boarding is happening because we (a) usually travel alone, (b) have acquired a really good gut feel for the amount of time it takes to get to the gate and (c) have CLEAR and TSA Precheck or similar security programs to move through security rapidly.
Most Americans only travel by plane once or twice yearly. It doesn't look that way in an airport, but that's the magic of large numbers at work. Those travelers don't have any of these advantages. Many of those people travel with families, and everyone with kids knows how big of a job traveling with kids is. Many people also don't know how to transit through security, given how little they travel. They need the three hours.
Modern airports are built around this, like the article describes, but this is also what people _want_. Many people praise how luxurious some international airports are, especially when compared to ones in the US. Them serving as lush shopping malls is a big part of that.
Airport spending is also a huge economic driver for cities. So many taxes get shoved into purchases at airports and rental cars. Cities aren't going to just give that revenue up.
> Many people also don't know how to transit through security, given how little they travel. They need the three hours.
More and more are getting pre-check status since their credit cards pay for it. More than once I have been stuck behind a group (LAX Int'l terminal) where the middle aged male would hand a stack of 4-6 passports to the unlucky TSA person who will either be annoyed and purposely take their sweet time looking through the passports and handing them to each person and telling them they have to be the one to hand it over or hand them all back to the guy and tell him to give the passports to their owner to be checked, at which point there is a 50/50 chance (in my experience) that he will start arguing with the TSA person, throughly embarrassing the adolescent humans in the group.
The MyTSA app is great for getting average wait times, which check points are open/closed and instructions for how to do security. As someone else posted, Planning ahead pays off.
> Many people praise how luxurious some international airports are, especially when compared to ones in the US. Them serving as lush shopping malls is a big part of that.
One of my early international travel experiences was clearing customs at Amsterdam Schiphol and being dropped into a literal mall while looking for the train; it was one of my more bewildering and awestruck airport experiences
People are told to eat less processed food and more vegetables and yet we’re all fat. Nobody listens.
Anybody who listens to this either doesn’t travel much or is the sort of person who’d get there that early anyway. Unless I’m checking a bag (which means I’m going somewhere that I’m anticipating bringing a lot of stuff back) I lazily aim for an hour early and am closer to 45 minutes. I’d be even later but there’s substantial chance of random traffic between me and the airport I most frequently fly out of.
I take at least 6 - 8 flights a year and I have never needed to show up to the airport 2 hours early, but for some reason, I still do. Maybe it's superstition? I almost always end up at my gate within 15 minutes of walking into the airport (thanks TSA PreCheck!) That being said, even if I could confidently start showing up 45 minutes before my plane is about to take off, I'm essentially just sitting around at home, waiting to get a ride to the airport. So I'm either sitting in a chair on my laptop at home or doing the same at the airport. At least the airport has a Starbucks.
I cannot relax before I’ve physically visited the gate, starting from the night before. I sleep poorly before a flight, waking up a hundred times to glance at the clock to make sure I haven’t overslept.
I’ve never overslept. It doesn’t matter.
So, my mental options are 1) give in, get up, take a leisurely trip to the airport without worries of an unplanned traffic slowdown, get through security, stroll to my gate to make sure I know where it is, then find a lounge and chill in relaxation knowing that everything’s fine, or 2) stress out that something might go wrong and make me miss my flight up and wish I’d left earlier.
I know me. I’ve done this plenty of times. This is my choice. So I go with the first every time: get there too early, then chill more than I possibly could if I were anywhere else. Either way I’m going to be up and moving. Why not use that time to radically de-stress my morning?
> I cannot relax before I’ve physically visited the gate.
Haha, oh lawd I can relate. After getting through security with hours to spare before boarding, I make sure to check that my gate actually exists before I can relax.
Had to check your screen name to make sure my dad didn’t just find out about HN :) He’s very much like that and this is exactly what I meant about some people who would get there very early anyway. I get it.
Some of this may be because a lot of my formative year travels were when I was in the military. In practice, no one’s likely to send you to Leavenworth just because you missed a flight and got back late, but it’d certainly give your boss an opportunity to yell about it if they wanted to. Consequences today are more about expense and inconvenience than trouble, but a little core bit of me still recoils in horror at the idea of not making my plane.
Planning ahead pays off when something eventually goes wrong at every step.
Late start, traffic, late shuttle, understaffed security, long lines, construction, gate moved to another concourse, gate moved to another concourse - if you put enough buffer time in the schedule, you can still make the flight.
Nailed it. All of those things are outside of my control and completely random. I can only make sure I’ve given myself the flexibility to adapt to them.
The last thing I want is to start thinking of the worst that could happen. I am very creative and my brain won’t shut up once started. I’ll get stuck in a strange airport for 12 hours, and have to sleep in a chair which will hurt my back and I’ll have to get a refill of muscle relaxants, which will probably get me addicted and homeless. My cat will miss her meal and starve to death. My bank will see that I’m outside the travel window I’d told them about, see strange changes from Tampa, and cancel my debit card. Or if I’m heading to a business trip, it’ll leave such a bad impression on my boss that I’ll have to get a new job.
I could go on like this for an hour.
I’m not really that anxious 99.9% of the time, but add in the inherent stress of travel, especially if it’s for business, and we’re off to the races.
Orrrr, I could get there early since I’m awake and moving anyway, find a lounge, and have a leisurely breakfast and beverage before settling in with my Switch or an ereader. That’s my choice by a wide margin.
If it makes you feel better I’ve flown a bit more than that (not a ton more) for 25ish years and only once have I missed a flight as a result. And it was a Sunday morning leaving Las Vegas during March madness so really, I knew better.
I’ve talked to touring musicians who say they aim for 15 minutes before boarding.
It depends on the airport and when you show up, but walking straight through security with TSA PreCheck is becoming less and less of a sure thing. At SeaTac, checkpoint #5 is PreCheck only and it can still take 20-40 minutes at busy periods.
It's probably still worth it, but just keep an eye on checkpoint wait times if your airport publishes them and don't just assume PreCheck means you can show up whenever.
I’ve seen airports where Clear is slower than Precheck. It’s all dependent on your local airport and the types of travelers it tends to attract. My home airport still has pretty quick Precheck lines. My last flight, I needed to check a bag. I walked into the terminal 70 minutes before departure (not my plan). I had my bag checked, through security, and seated at my gate 55 minutes before departure. I haven’t always been so lucky but the odds were in my favor that day.
This is PDX, not the biggest airport but not a tiny one either.
Have you tried looking for the 'more vegetables' option?
It effectively doesn't exist. "Salads" are nearly all BS lettuce leaves with some sugary condiments and overly sugary dressing to make up for the complete lack of flavor.
Sides are a hit/miss even if you do ask for a vegetable option.
I have not seen a vegetable forward, optimized for taste and texture option on _any_ menu I've looked at all year. Professionals can't figure out how to do this. How am I, a non-chef with very little time, supposed to do better?
Wait, people actually show up 3 hours before their flight?
I try to make it 1 hour before, and that's only because of bag drop off deadlines. I know plenty of light travellers that show up 15-30 minutes before departure, basically at gate close time.
American airports are inefficient. Unless you're flying from a rural airport, expect long security lines. Even with TSA precheck it can take 30 minutes. I also recently found out it is not always open (only during core hours).
Also we don't have good mass transportation. If you're in EU, Asia you can take a train and be pretty certain you'll get there on time (barring a big event). In the US...a crash on the interstate can wreck your day. A sporting event can cause huge traffic jams on the main arterial road. So I to leave my house early enough for the 2/3 hour "before the flight" to pad for that.
My recent international flights were out of Mexico, London, Hong Kong and security lines are short. I was expecting some kind of secondary check point (Having said that I recall flying out of Toronto and it was like Disney world line)
Security checkpoint times can vary widely in the States. As can the transportation to get to the airport (traffic, public transport, parking, shuttle). And don't get me started on kids and family members who don't travel often.
Three hours is totally unnecessary but the asymmetric risk of missing a flight vs posting up with a beer and a gameboy tilts things toward an earlier arrival.
It's refreshing to travel from a regional airport though.
Just to add the the anecdotes: In my experience over ~20 years flying out of Newark and Philadelphia, 1 hour is enough 75% of the time, 2 hours is enough 95% of the time, and 3 hours is enough almost 100% of the time (I have once had three hours go by from walking through the front doors to the gate). That doesn't mean you always show up 2 or 3 hours ahead though - you adjust your estimate by time of year, time of day, and international vs domestic.
Limited experience, but yes, ~2 hours does seem to be enough most of the time, adjust to more if it's a busy day / week for various reasons. (holidays, big sporting events, etc)
Also depends on the person. I am brown, have a long beard, and wear a head cover. Almost every time I fly in the US I get a pat down, my bag manually searched, or a canine sniff. I budget extra time for it.
Your approval, or not, of the TSA's security theater is an entirely different issue than chuckling as you refer to 9/11 as "that one terrorism" (and ignoring numerous other incidents prior to, and after it).
I'd also hesitate to refer to a pat down and manual search, as annoying as they may be, as "harassment."
They're not the only one, we're all harassed at the airport every time. Going through the clownshow of TSA (which STILL fails the vast majority of its audits) wasn't the last of it, now they're doing facial scanning at the gate.
Are you Sikh, by chance? If so, what do you do with that little knife you carry when you fly? I’ve never thought about that when I had the opportunity to actually find out.
That doesn’t sound like a roll of the dice or anything.
I’d wondered how that was handled, as a religious object. It’s obviously more important to the holder than my pocketknife is to me, and I have zero concern about a Sikh person carrying one anywhere. They’re not going to bust that out. And yet, it is a knife.
Probably the closest I’ve been that that was flying home from our wedding with the cake knife in my carryon. The TSA agent’s eyes widened when I hold him the shadow on the X-ray was a cake knife, but then I took it out and showed him how it was a ceremonial thing and wouldn’t break skin. Then the agent laughed and sent us along our way. A Kirpan isn’t so delicate, though.
Very much depends on the airport. Before I was an experienced traveler, I used to show up at O’Hare in Chicago 3 hours early because who knows how long the security lines will be. It was overkill, but gave me piece of mind.
At some point I took a job that required significant travel, and I learned to cut things much closer. Usually not less than 45 mins. But if I’m flying internationally I’ll still show up at least 2 hours early.
I too mostly fly out of O'Hare. Once I got global entry, I was a reliable 45-60 minutes before wheels up guy. I have never had Precheck take longer than 15 minutes.
In the US, I usually show up about an hour before. A little less if I'm traveling alone, but holiday are a disaster at American airports.
Once, I showed up two hours before a flight a few days after Christmas. I had a lapchild, so we needed to check in with a person and not use the kiosks.
We stood in line for 90 minutes, then stood in the security line for 30 minutes and missed our flight. They couldn't rebook my family for a week. We rented a minivan and drove 1800 miles, without our luggage.
In Germany as soon the Deutsche Bahn is somehow involved you better make it even longer than 3h as soon as the long distance train network is involved.
The punctuality of the trains is incredibly poor. And the chances are above zero to end up at a train station in the middle of bmfck nowhere.
Not my first time spending a night at Frankfurt Airport. But not within the comfy sterile zone after check-in... more like sitting in front of the small overpriced 24/7 supermarket.
Do you book the train with your airline? Not sure if that’s a possibility but you should definitely check. In that case they should offer you a hotel for the night.
I've always assumed they tell you to arrive early in order to account for the chance it will take you longer than you guess to get there, just like doctors do. I've never had it take 2 hours from arrival to gate, but I have been 90 minutes late because of traffic and would have missed my flight (not a big deal) if I hadn't aimed for being there two hours early. In any case, the assumption that this time is wasted is spurious whether you're a road warrior catching up with e-mail or a tourist researching your trip, you're not sitting in a lounge chair like a zombie.
Nowadays with so many people having lounge access via credit cards it's not like you have to sit at the gate in a noisy environment anymore.
For me I get there 2 hours early, quickly verify my gate wasn't changed (sometimes that info only shows up on the internal monitors at the airport), and then go to the lounge and read a book, code, do whatever. Free drinks and snacks.
The TSA has a workforce of 65,000 people, it's an insane waste of collective time and energy. Meanwhile private planes don't even have to go through the TSA, presumably because big donors have actual political pull and the risk is laughably low. Too bad Elon didn't pick the TSA as a DOGE target, it would have been actually useful and wildly popular.
> speed when accounting for loading/unloading and security
Try to book a train trip from Brest, Bretagne, France to Vienna, Austria. Just halfway across western Europe. You'll wind up having to take four trains and likely change stations in a way that involves a metro or a bus, book on two or three different websites, if it goes perfectly it will take anywhere from 15-18 hours of travel time and if any single part gets delayed you will be staying in a very expensive overnight hotel and be out hundreds of extra euros.
Or you can take an Air France booking for literally half the cost, with a single plane change that is guaranteed, and it will take about 6 hours including the airport security and loading time.
Seriously, people constantly talk about train travel (in europe) like it is amazing and it's only true for very short distances. Otherwise it is a travel nightmare. And I hate airports too, but, things have gotten worse train wise in the last 20 years, I swear.
> But for flights that don't span water, my understanding is that it's almost certain that a train system is far superior.
I'll assume you are speaking theoretically, as the inter-city train system in the US is mostly a joke except for some very specific routes (such as NYC-Philly-Baltimore-DC)
Even in an ideal world, a coast-to-coast train express train in the US is going to be way slower than flying. If time isn't a major consideration or is "downtime" anyway, such as a overnight sleeper train than it might be somewhat better, but chances of that ever getting built are essentially zero in a world where we can't even connect two major cities on one coast.
What could have been? How could you build a train system from say, Denver to Los Angeles, Miami to New Orleans, Chicago to Dallas, that could be less than 3-4x the flight time and have enough passengers to be remotely economical (not necessarily profitable, just not a massive drain)?
I think there are two kinds of people: Those who fly often and those who fly a few times a year.
Regular flyers know their airports, the days and vacation times. Then you can reduce to 30 minutes airport time.
If you only fly a few times a year or don't know the airport well and are traveling during the vacation season, you have to play it safe.
Then 1 hour of flight time can quickly add up to 4-6 hours.
However, as long as airplane fuel is subsidized, few people will pay twice as much for trains, even if they are just as fast or faster and much more comfortable.
> Taking an extra two hours per passenger on average, that’s 1.725 billion hours, or $83 billion cost to the economy just for extra time wasted for domestic passengers.
That seems really wrong to me?
1. Business flyers are getting paid for the day, wherever they are. Whether they spend an extra hour in the office or at an airport is orthogonal to them getting paid. They may be producing less output which in turn decreases GDP, but that's its own can of worms and also not what this is trying to calculate anyway.
2. Leisure flyers, naturally, fly when either their business is closed or they've taken time off. So again, whether they leave at 2AM or 4AM, they're not getting paid for that day.
I don't think the layman would end up with any more money in their pocket were they to leave 2 hours later for their flights.
This is a very pessimistic view. Everyone adjusts their lives including business and leisure flyers to account for the unpredictable time needed at the airport. This not only affects the travelers but also people around them or connected to them. This has cascading effect on time used for other tasks which indirectly affects the productivity of a person overall.
I once made insane time to the airport, caught the parking shuttle right as it was leaving, hit zero-line security, and found my flight delayed, leaving me with a massive block of time I then spent on the phone coaching a colleague to help him prep for an interview, which he subsequently aced.
The 3-hours is a recommendation so that the airline can "cover its ass". Air Travel got worse after Covid, especially for International travel. Domestic is less complicated but if you are travelling internationally, the security checks are a plenty and I have learnt my lesson to be at least 3 hours early. Most of the time, the time was wasted between passport/visa checks, slow check-in, buggy self-checkin so back to queue, slow security, slow passport checks, big airport -> takes lots of time to move around, etc.
I had a Turkey-China flights 3 months ago. I arrived at Istanbul international more than 3 hours early. Between all of what I described above, I arrived at my gate just 10-15 minutes before departure.
I am actually wondering about the lost opportunity cost to have these large expensive airports with all these shops and then leave passengers with no time to shop around.
My last two international arrivals back into the US were at ATL and JFK. Both times I had more than a three hour layover. Both times they were boarding my middling group when I got to my gate. Train broke down at ATL. Lines were super long and slow at JFK (both Global Entry and TSA). There’s no way I would book less than two hours these days unless I know there are many options for my connecting flight when things go south.
Airports are shopping malls. The article underestimates the sales being generated from a captive audience.
The show up lead time recommendation isn't followed by everyone, of course. But it produces a distribution of arrivals. The farther out, the more it moderates the peak arrival of passengers at the counter. The idea is to reduce that peak so that airlines save money not having to overstaff.
But also, if an airline is willing to set a policy that favors additional time for their passengers to spend more money, maybe they get a fraction of a percentage reduction in rent or some other kind of rebate?
We don't know all the incentives that go into the way things are the way they are.
I'm not sure how the credit card lounges make up their costs. Given Chase is raising their premium card from $600 to $800, it seems it's increased aggregate demand for such perks.
Ugh, this cost to the economy calculation because you aren't at your desk is not accurate. There is no way the loss is simply equivalent to your rough hourly rate for your time. There is no way to quantify whether for this or for bank holidays how much money was lost from the economy. Especially when salaried employees can still do their tasks for the week or month with or without that extra day.
The price at which someone sells their time seems like a pretty good indicator of how much they value their time. An hour of lost leisure is still a loss, even if it doesn't affect GDP.
You can get a much lower value for time by measuring how much extra time people are willing to spend to save some money on groceries and other purchases.
But this is not a new problem. There are established models for the value of time in most countries, and they are used extensively when planning traffic and infrastructure. Typically the value of working time is based on the cost to the employer, while free time is valued between 1/3 and 1/2 of the nominal wage. As most trips (including commute) are done in free time, the average value of time is ~1/2 of the wage.
Makes sense since it is part of your employment commitment.
How do you value your Saturday grocery run? The multiple hours spent at kids sports practices? Time spent doing home improvements? Those are the hours that are more difficult to accurately model.
But salaried jobs are not time based. They are often focused on doing a task across many months, one less productive day won't mean a significant loss financially for the company. We all have less productive days, is that a direct loss financially to the gdp? What about more productive days is that
me helping the gdp? Or does it balance out?
Fixing time wasted at an airport could be useful but it's not the biggest issue ever and I certainly wouldn't frame it as a GDP issue if we could fix it. More efficient for humans to do things they want to do with their time, not to do work instead.
Even trading time for money jobs, are not as clear as that, as often you produce far more money for the business than you get in return. So a simple addition of what your pay per hour is to the overall cost sum is still not accurate.
I would agree it is tiring, but how much of an issue is one slow day at work. How do you factor in that each day is such a small part of what I assume is a bigger project or goal?
Then what are they doing at work all day??? If they spend 20% of their week slacking off then they would get paid more if they just worked the whole time and got more done
Because a salary is about doing the task you are employed to do, it's not about filling up every available moment or that you are slacking if you have free time one week. If an employee is able to find a quicker way to do the tasks they need to do that week than the norm, good for them as long as it means the work is done to the same standard and on time.
I don’t buy it. This assumes the tasks to be done are fixed, pre-determined, binary pass/fail kinds of things. Many (most? all?) salaried jobs aren’t like that: you can spend more time and do more, or so it more thoughtfully, insightfully, carefully, etc.
I would agree many aren't like that, but you can set your own deadlines and tasks and break down a big project into smaller goals. One day's difference in a big research project or when developing a piece of software is not going to change the cost or lose significant value in society or to the business. So why would that be attributed as loss in these calculations?
Every improvement to heavier-than-air air travel is a waste of resources. Mass rapid transit over land became a solved problem in 12th century Germany when mine workers put wagons on wooden rails, and same for air travel when the Montgolfier brothers floated a sheep, duck, and rooster in a hot air balloon for the pleasure of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Planes spend a tremendous amount of fuel, cramp people into a tiny space, require substantial engineering efforts and time to upkeep, are incredibly difficult to automate, incredibly difficult to route efficiently, require gobsmacking infrastructure to safely take-off, land, and route, and thousands of manhours of training and hundreds of humans per plane, per day, to handle every aspect of operation. And yet still sometimes they crash, sometimes even on purpose.
Meanwhile the modern train is nigh-uncrashable with modern safety technologies, even if someone wanted to. They're so simple to automate you can create an entire scale model automated system in your basement with safety features and routing, and reprogram it, with the knowledge within just a couple books. They take up far less space and their routing is simpler, their infrastructure may on the surface seem larger but in reality are basically one and done two slabs of iron that are dead simple to maintain. They're already electrified, already automated, already safe, already more comfortable, already faster point-to-point when you consider that they can take you from one city center to another and require far less security since they can't be crashed into buildings by hijackers (so you can show up 10 minutes before departure and stroll on).
For getting over oceans we should use blimps, which are awesome, or humongous sailing ships, which would also be awesome. Hell if you want you can even "fly" the most modern of sailing ships. There's your plane, you degenerates that chose planes as your special interest. Pick a real one, pick hydrofoil sailing ships instead.
> And yet still sometimes they crash, sometimes even on purpose.
> Meanwhile the modern train is nigh-uncrashable with modern safety technologies, even if someone wanted to.
Your comment is super misleading because it makes it sound like trains are safer than planes, but in fact, trains have several times more fatalities per passenger-mile than planes do.
The incentives for the airport are to be as cheap as possible, which they do by not having enough staff manning bagging/security et el for the peaks. Airports are a natural monopoly within an area so there isn't competition to loose out to, there is no where else for the planes and travellers to go and cities wont be putting down space for multiple airports to compete.
Because of the monopoly aspect it requires legal requirements for service guarantees to be laid out on the airports to fix this, without which the situation wont change and the risk will continue to lay with the customer for airport failures and they have little choice but to turn up early to mitigate the risk of the airport not having enough capacity. Its a system where all the companies are acting in their own best interest.
One thing that would tend to discourage frequent travelers from determining their optimal pre-flight margin would be to have somewhat arbitrary and frequently-changing security procedures and requirements. A second way to encourage long loitering times would be to under-staff vital functions such as Air Traffic Control.
EWR appears to have nailed these strategies.
Anyone who doesn't work for the airlines at large commercial airports in the US, is very likely to be a government employee. TSA being a very large portion of that. They do not have any direct incentives to be cheap.
In large urban areas you will generally have more than one airport, so its not the monopoly you're making it out to be. Any delays caused by the airline (long lines at bag check) would also be subject to competition with the airport itself from competing airlines.
Then you also have problems on the other end. You can easily lose a whole day at your destination. That might mean the car you’re planning to rent is no longer available, the person picking you up is no longer free, you miss an connection etc.
Of course if we have one hour electric commuter flights which just turn around and go again that makes things very different. Worst case, assuming there’s seats, you’re out two hours and on the next flight. So what the article is describing is a totally different game.
Us seasoned travelers are very comfortable being in airports and airplanes. We have no problem with getting to our gate as boarding is happening because we (a) usually travel alone, (b) have acquired a really good gut feel for the amount of time it takes to get to the gate and (c) have CLEAR and TSA Precheck or similar security programs to move through security rapidly.
Most Americans only travel by plane once or twice yearly. It doesn't look that way in an airport, but that's the magic of large numbers at work. Those travelers don't have any of these advantages. Many of those people travel with families, and everyone with kids knows how big of a job traveling with kids is. Many people also don't know how to transit through security, given how little they travel. They need the three hours.
Modern airports are built around this, like the article describes, but this is also what people _want_. Many people praise how luxurious some international airports are, especially when compared to ones in the US. Them serving as lush shopping malls is a big part of that.
Airport spending is also a huge economic driver for cities. So many taxes get shoved into purchases at airports and rental cars. Cities aren't going to just give that revenue up.
More and more are getting pre-check status since their credit cards pay for it. More than once I have been stuck behind a group (LAX Int'l terminal) where the middle aged male would hand a stack of 4-6 passports to the unlucky TSA person who will either be annoyed and purposely take their sweet time looking through the passports and handing them to each person and telling them they have to be the one to hand it over or hand them all back to the guy and tell him to give the passports to their owner to be checked, at which point there is a 50/50 chance (in my experience) that he will start arguing with the TSA person, throughly embarrassing the adolescent humans in the group.
The MyTSA app is great for getting average wait times, which check points are open/closed and instructions for how to do security. As someone else posted, Planning ahead pays off.
> Many people praise how luxurious some international airports are, especially when compared to ones in the US. Them serving as lush shopping malls is a big part of that.
One of my early international travel experiences was clearing customs at Amsterdam Schiphol and being dropped into a literal mall while looking for the train; it was one of my more bewildering and awestruck airport experiences
Anybody who listens to this either doesn’t travel much or is the sort of person who’d get there that early anyway. Unless I’m checking a bag (which means I’m going somewhere that I’m anticipating bringing a lot of stuff back) I lazily aim for an hour early and am closer to 45 minutes. I’d be even later but there’s substantial chance of random traffic between me and the airport I most frequently fly out of.
I’ve never overslept. It doesn’t matter.
So, my mental options are 1) give in, get up, take a leisurely trip to the airport without worries of an unplanned traffic slowdown, get through security, stroll to my gate to make sure I know where it is, then find a lounge and chill in relaxation knowing that everything’s fine, or 2) stress out that something might go wrong and make me miss my flight up and wish I’d left earlier.
I know me. I’ve done this plenty of times. This is my choice. So I go with the first every time: get there too early, then chill more than I possibly could if I were anywhere else. Either way I’m going to be up and moving. Why not use that time to radically de-stress my morning?
Haha, oh lawd I can relate. After getting through security with hours to spare before boarding, I make sure to check that my gate actually exists before I can relax.
Some of this may be because a lot of my formative year travels were when I was in the military. In practice, no one’s likely to send you to Leavenworth just because you missed a flight and got back late, but it’d certainly give your boss an opportunity to yell about it if they wanted to. Consequences today are more about expense and inconvenience than trouble, but a little core bit of me still recoils in horror at the idea of not making my plane.
Late start, traffic, late shuttle, understaffed security, long lines, construction, gate moved to another concourse, gate moved to another concourse - if you put enough buffer time in the schedule, you can still make the flight.
Doesn't matter, I'm wired the same way.
I could go on like this for an hour.
I’m not really that anxious 99.9% of the time, but add in the inherent stress of travel, especially if it’s for business, and we’re off to the races.
Orrrr, I could get there early since I’m awake and moving anyway, find a lounge, and have a leisurely breakfast and beverage before settling in with my Switch or an ereader. That’s my choice by a wide margin.
I’ve talked to touring musicians who say they aim for 15 minutes before boarding.
It's probably still worth it, but just keep an eye on checkpoint wait times if your airport publishes them and don't just assume PreCheck means you can show up whenever.
Of course, you might end up waiting an hour for the chair.
This is PDX, not the biggest airport but not a tiny one either.
It effectively doesn't exist. "Salads" are nearly all BS lettuce leaves with some sugary condiments and overly sugary dressing to make up for the complete lack of flavor.
Sides are a hit/miss even if you do ask for a vegetable option.
I have not seen a vegetable forward, optimized for taste and texture option on _any_ menu I've looked at all year. Professionals can't figure out how to do this. How am I, a non-chef with very little time, supposed to do better?
I try to make it 1 hour before, and that's only because of bag drop off deadlines. I know plenty of light travellers that show up 15-30 minutes before departure, basically at gate close time.
(disclaimer: in the EU)
Also we don't have good mass transportation. If you're in EU, Asia you can take a train and be pretty certain you'll get there on time (barring a big event). In the US...a crash on the interstate can wreck your day. A sporting event can cause huge traffic jams on the main arterial road. So I to leave my house early enough for the 2/3 hour "before the flight" to pad for that.
My recent international flights were out of Mexico, London, Hong Kong and security lines are short. I was expecting some kind of secondary check point (Having said that I recall flying out of Toronto and it was like Disney world line)
1. no transit terminals so everyone has to do full immigration
2. no international one-stop-security, so every international arrival with a connection (except those pre-cleared) have to redo it
UK airports are also guilty of #2
Three hours is totally unnecessary but the asymmetric risk of missing a flight vs posting up with a beer and a gameboy tilts things toward an earlier arrival.
It's refreshing to travel from a regional airport though.
I'd also hesitate to refer to a pat down and manual search, as annoying as they may be, as "harassment."
Are you Sikh, by chance? If so, what do you do with that little knife you carry when you fly? I’ve never thought about that when I had the opportunity to actually find out.
I’d wondered how that was handled, as a religious object. It’s obviously more important to the holder than my pocketknife is to me, and I have zero concern about a Sikh person carrying one anywhere. They’re not going to bust that out. And yet, it is a knife.
Probably the closest I’ve been that that was flying home from our wedding with the cake knife in my carryon. The TSA agent’s eyes widened when I hold him the shadow on the X-ray was a cake knife, but then I took it out and showed him how it was a ceremonial thing and wouldn’t break skin. Then the agent laughed and sent us along our way. A Kirpan isn’t so delicate, though.
At some point I took a job that required significant travel, and I learned to cut things much closer. Usually not less than 45 mins. But if I’m flying internationally I’ll still show up at least 2 hours early.
Once, I showed up two hours before a flight a few days after Christmas. I had a lapchild, so we needed to check in with a person and not use the kiosks.
We stood in line for 90 minutes, then stood in the security line for 30 minutes and missed our flight. They couldn't rebook my family for a week. We rented a minivan and drove 1800 miles, without our luggage.
The punctuality of the trains is incredibly poor. And the chances are above zero to end up at a train station in the middle of bmfck nowhere.
Not my first time spending a night at Frankfurt Airport. But not within the comfy sterile zone after check-in... more like sitting in front of the small overpriced 24/7 supermarket.
https://youtu.be/ps2IZyV3Ih4
For me I get there 2 hours early, quickly verify my gate wasn't changed (sometimes that info only shows up on the internal monitors at the airport), and then go to the lounge and read a book, code, do whatever. Free drinks and snacks.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there should be no security checks - but it has to be astronomical.
If it seemed to be the only possible reality, I wouldn't care.
But for flights that don't span water, my understanding is that it's almost certain that a train system is far superior.
(Emissions, weight&volume vs energy expenditure, and speed when accounting for loading/unloading and security).
Try to book a train trip from Brest, Bretagne, France to Vienna, Austria. Just halfway across western Europe. You'll wind up having to take four trains and likely change stations in a way that involves a metro or a bus, book on two or three different websites, if it goes perfectly it will take anywhere from 15-18 hours of travel time and if any single part gets delayed you will be staying in a very expensive overnight hotel and be out hundreds of extra euros.
Or you can take an Air France booking for literally half the cost, with a single plane change that is guaranteed, and it will take about 6 hours including the airport security and loading time.
Seriously, people constantly talk about train travel (in europe) like it is amazing and it's only true for very short distances. Otherwise it is a travel nightmare. And I hate airports too, but, things have gotten worse train wise in the last 20 years, I swear.
I'll assume you are speaking theoretically, as the inter-city train system in the US is mostly a joke except for some very specific routes (such as NYC-Philly-Baltimore-DC)
Even in an ideal world, a coast-to-coast train express train in the US is going to be way slower than flying. If time isn't a major consideration or is "downtime" anyway, such as a overnight sleeper train than it might be somewhat better, but chances of that ever getting built are essentially zero in a world where we can't even connect two major cities on one coast.
It's frustrating to contemplate what could have been.
That’s an ideal world that should have been a given. But unfortunately for most of the world this is a fantasy.
Airplane fuel is subsidized? I thought it was taxed in the US.
That seems really wrong to me?
1. Business flyers are getting paid for the day, wherever they are. Whether they spend an extra hour in the office or at an airport is orthogonal to them getting paid. They may be producing less output which in turn decreases GDP, but that's its own can of worms and also not what this is trying to calculate anyway.
2. Leisure flyers, naturally, fly when either their business is closed or they've taken time off. So again, whether they leave at 2AM or 4AM, they're not getting paid for that day.
I don't think the layman would end up with any more money in their pocket were they to leave 2 hours later for their flights.
I had a Turkey-China flights 3 months ago. I arrived at Istanbul international more than 3 hours early. Between all of what I described above, I arrived at my gate just 10-15 minutes before departure.
I am actually wondering about the lost opportunity cost to have these large expensive airports with all these shops and then leave passengers with no time to shop around.
The show up lead time recommendation isn't followed by everyone, of course. But it produces a distribution of arrivals. The farther out, the more it moderates the peak arrival of passengers at the counter. The idea is to reduce that peak so that airlines save money not having to overstaff.
But also, if an airline is willing to set a policy that favors additional time for their passengers to spend more money, maybe they get a fraction of a percentage reduction in rent or some other kind of rebate?
We don't know all the incentives that go into the way things are the way they are.
I'm not sure how the credit card lounges make up their costs. Given Chase is raising their premium card from $600 to $800, it seems it's increased aggregate demand for such perks.
But this is not a new problem. There are established models for the value of time in most countries, and they are used extensively when planning traffic and infrastructure. Typically the value of working time is based on the cost to the employer, while free time is valued between 1/3 and 1/2 of the nominal wage. As most trips (including commute) are done in free time, the average value of time is ~1/2 of the wage.
How do you value your Saturday grocery run? The multiple hours spent at kids sports practices? Time spent doing home improvements? Those are the hours that are more difficult to accurately model.
Fixing time wasted at an airport could be useful but it's not the biggest issue ever and I certainly wouldn't frame it as a GDP issue if we could fix it. More efficient for humans to do things they want to do with their time, not to do work instead.
Even trading time for money jobs, are not as clear as that, as often you produce far more money for the business than you get in return. So a simple addition of what your pay per hour is to the overall cost sum is still not accurate.
You actually become quite tired from this airport stuff, and even if you get back to the office the next day you'll be less productive.
Planes spend a tremendous amount of fuel, cramp people into a tiny space, require substantial engineering efforts and time to upkeep, are incredibly difficult to automate, incredibly difficult to route efficiently, require gobsmacking infrastructure to safely take-off, land, and route, and thousands of manhours of training and hundreds of humans per plane, per day, to handle every aspect of operation. And yet still sometimes they crash, sometimes even on purpose.
Meanwhile the modern train is nigh-uncrashable with modern safety technologies, even if someone wanted to. They're so simple to automate you can create an entire scale model automated system in your basement with safety features and routing, and reprogram it, with the knowledge within just a couple books. They take up far less space and their routing is simpler, their infrastructure may on the surface seem larger but in reality are basically one and done two slabs of iron that are dead simple to maintain. They're already electrified, already automated, already safe, already more comfortable, already faster point-to-point when you consider that they can take you from one city center to another and require far less security since they can't be crashed into buildings by hijackers (so you can show up 10 minutes before departure and stroll on).
For getting over oceans we should use blimps, which are awesome, or humongous sailing ships, which would also be awesome. Hell if you want you can even "fly" the most modern of sailing ships. There's your plane, you degenerates that chose planes as your special interest. Pick a real one, pick hydrofoil sailing ships instead.
Yet for some inconceivable reason, dozens of trains around the world still crash or derail every year [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(2020%E...
> Meanwhile the modern train is nigh-uncrashable with modern safety technologies, even if someone wanted to.
Your comment is super misleading because it makes it sound like trains are safer than planes, but in fact, trains have several times more fatalities per passenger-mile than planes do.