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No break from long lines at airports

The threatened summer of discontent for American travelers got underway Memorial Day weekend as the understaffed Transportation Security Administration struggled to keep its security lines moving in the nation's airports.

The threatened summer of discontent for American travelers got underway Memorial Day weekend as the understaffed Transportation Security Administration struggled to keep its security lines moving in the nation's airports.

The backups happened at most big airports and some smaller ones, particularly at the choice hours when passengers prefer to fly, and they seemed to occur most often when a particular flight was drawing hundreds of passengers to a single checkpoint.

At Chicago's O'Hare International that was terminal three at 7 a.m. Sunday. At Boston's Logan International the crush at B1 came at 4:40 p.m. Saturday. The checkpoint at 4B in New York's John F. Kennedy International was moving with painful slowness at 12:30 p.m. Sunday. Crunch time came at Atlanta's north checkpoint at 3:15 p.m. Sunday.

Philadelphia was apparently spared.

Passengers experienced average wait times of just under 20 minutes, said Philadelphia International Airport spokeswoman Diane Gerace.

She said Philadelphia's airport might have an advantage because each of the facility's seven terminals has its own security checkpoint, while some other airports funnel passengers through a centralized security station.

On a weekend more known for picnics in the park and backyard barbecues, rather than flying to distant destinations, the long lines at many airports seemed a harbinger of things to come this summer.

Some relief should come next month as 768 newly-trained TSA agents join the lines. If Congress follows through on a request to shuffle $28 million in TSA funds, 2,784 part-time workers can be shifted to full-time status.

"This will enable us to screen almost 82,000 additional passengers per day," said the secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson. But he added a warning: "In the face of increased air travel volume, we will not compromise aviation security."

The cost-conscious Congress has squeezed the TSA budget in recent years, reducing its airport workforce of about 45,000 by 12 percent. An additional 1,600 workers were slated to go this year before the new TSA administrator, Peter V. Neffenger, appealed for relief.

The cutbacks came as a near-record 740 million passengers are expected to fly this year, 97 million more than flew three years ago. That passenger load combined with staffing shortages at TSA checkpoints and procedural changes implemented by Neffenger have resulted in some passengers waiting hours to clear screening.

The big change came after the inspector general said last summer that his undercover operators were able to slip through the lines 95 percent of the time with guns or phony bombs. Neffenger ended a practice that diverted randomly-selected passengers to lines designated for those who had volunteered for pre-flight background checks.

Now, the airlines are begging Congress for help and telling passengers to arrive hours before they hope to fly. At some smaller airports, the wait time to clear security has doubled, at some mega-airports it routinely tops an hour and sometimes stretches to two or three hours. One airline says it delayed 37 flights from a single airport in a single day. Another airline says that so far this year, excessive security delays have caused 70,000 passengers and 40,000 checked bags to miss their flights.

As the TSA rushes to adjust for a summer that promises near-record air travel for which the agency is understaffed, passengers say they are adjusting too.

"I saw the news, and that's why we got here early today," Freda Funk said last week as she worked her way through a line that snaked almost from the ticket counter to the X-ray machine at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. She was there almost two hours before her flight.

Larry Birunks flies several times a week and has joined the TSA PreCheck program so that he can pass through designated lines that move twice as fast. Although he says he hasn't seen long lines anywhere, he knows what to expect when he flies from BWI at a peak hour.

"I'm flying out of here next week at 5:15 [in the morning]. I'll get here early for that," Birunks said.

Danielle Wefelmeyer flies for business about once a month, and she, too, paid the $85 fee to become a PreCheck member.

"Chicago always has long lines," she said, adding that a few of her fellow passengers don't help matters. "It's mostly people who don't listen to the TSA. They flat don't listen."

Long lines have been forecast for months and documented by miles of video and hundreds of stories like this one. They are caused by a combination of things - the near-record numbers of travelers, the TSA staffing shortages, tougher security standards and, as Wefelmeyer says, some unsavvy passengers.

"It's not always the TSA. Sometimes it's the passengers," said Maria Delaware, who has worked the TSA line at BWI for 14 years. "We're not blaming the passengers - we're just trying to get them through."

Nobody in the line has a bomb, and it's unlikely at any given moment that someone has a gun or a knife, although scores of "forgetful" people were caught carrying one or the other through a checkpoint last week. What they do have, however, is a laundry list of things that slow the long lines.

After decades of airport security, and far more intense screening since the 9/11 attacks, one might think that just about everybody had the drill down.

Not so.

Deborah Walsh, a checkpoint supervisor at BWI, says about 5 percent of passengers make mistakes that make long, slow lines grow longer and slower.

Some of the rules were in place before 9/11, and the rest have been around for close to 15 years: shoes, belts and jackets off, pockets empty, no water bottles or liquids in containers more than 3.4 ounces, and all of those mini-bottles have to be separated and placed into a clear plastic bag.

Staff writer Jason Laughlin contributed to this article.