Somebody mentioned SEA - I think it is Seattle. SEA is bad.
DFW is actually quite nice as a large airport. But I do not like HOU (Houston) at all - too much walk. AUS is nice, so is SJC (but I do not think it is as “nice” as AUS.) BDL (Hartford) is “nice” as well. PDX (Portland OR) is much nicer than SEA. ATX (Atlanta) is like the southwest counterpart of LAX, very bad. I could imagine JFK is just as bad, if not worse.
This opinion comes from a person who think Temple, TX or College Station, TX, is better than Dallas or Houston, as a city. I just hate being in a crowd.
Airports aren’t consistently busy on exact calendar dates of the year. They’re very busy at the beginning & end of holiday periods when huge masses of people are starting or ending their trips.
Jan 3 falls on a Sat this year. I expect it to be moderately busy. Sunday Jan 4 will be a zoo when everyone who has extended their winter holiday vacations to the last possile day are all travelling to get back just in time to go to work/school on Monday.
If u want to sleep later, invest in GLOBAL ENTRY ($100). It’s a better value than solely TSA-Pre, because GLOBAL ENTRY is good for 5 years & also expedites u through US Immigration/Customs when u reenter the US. GLOBAL ENTRY also enables u to use the TSA-Pre security screening lane. I can recall a few instances when I wouldn’t have made my flight w/o it because the security screening lines for the non-Pre rabble were sooooo looonnnggg.
I’m going to get GLOBAL ENTRY for my kids. The last time I entered the US w them, their not having it really slowed things down.
Airlines deliberately pad their schedules at busy times of day and for seasonal weather. If u look at any airline’s schedule for the same route on a given day, u will see that the congested a.m. & p.m. pushes have longer “travel times” than do midday or late evening flights.
If I had to limit my winter travel to routes that connected only in TX airports, I’d never get to where I have to be.
Forcing connections through Texas is silly. Airplanes anywhere can get delayed. We have had no snow here in Chicago this season, so why would you forego a better connection here?
Regarding TSA vs check-in lines - there can be patterns, but anything can happen. So you are just best off getting to the airport a good 90 mins before since you are not frequent flyers with high airline status.
“romani, He was washing the dishes for the whole family, not for his own dishes.”
He is a young American-raised man. This is not noteworthy in the least. This is just what is expected here culturally. You sit down at a family dinner, of course you help set the table and clear the dishes. It would be noteworthy (in a bad way) if he DIDN’T help and just let his mother do all the work.
We end up at the airport too early. 1 hour 20 min before the flight, we are ready to get through the TSA check point.
The ticket line for baggage check-in is not long, but all airport kiosks we used are extremely slow (Do they catch some computer virus today?!) Then, we found that even the computers used by the ticketing agents are extremely slow. At the airport of the hi tech center, the computers are still not managed well.
We finally checked in the baggage. We found many airport kiosks are partly used (because people believe they are not working so they abandon the kiosk but in fact they are working, just extremely slow.)
The TSA security line starts to get slightly longer. Maybe it is time to wait in line.
“SFO is a zoo also”. We flew out of SFO right after Thanksgiving and it was no problem at all. Of course we took one of those ridiculously early flights and the airport was pretty quiet. So, you have to make a choice. Fly west to east you are going to fly early if you don’t want to lose the entire day, and if you fly early the airport will be relatively quiet.
BTW, ATL is not ATX.
And as an aside, rambling about completely unrelated topics can annoy posters, detract from and often derail a thread. JMO.
We got back home. DS’s plane has left the gate and is taxing/ready to take off.
We will get back to sleep (if I can manage to do that.) DS’s long trip across the country has just started and it will be dark when he gets to his final destination airport (lose 3 hours due to the time zone difference.) Then, the land travel - waiting time (if the reserved limo service shows up - sometimes it does not) plus the land travel time will be easily another 2 hours.
Is the flight direct or is there a stop/plane change? When we took our flight from SFO (probably departed almost an hour earlier than your DS’s from SJO) we got into our location mid afternoon.
It is strange that the plane left the gate 2 minutes earlier than scheduled, but, 25 minutes after the original departure time, the plane is showing “taxing/left gate” on flightaware.com. (I have the habit of keeping track the progress of the flight while our family member is traveling.)
The connection time at DFW is very short (the time between the landing of the first flight and the taking off of the 2nd flight is only 55 minutes and need to change terminal by mono rail.) Hopefully the plane will take off soon.
(Don’t tell me that the computer used by the flight controller is also crawling…having been working with computers in my whole life, I really think the human beings invented some “monsters” that they do not know how to manage well (browsing for fun is fine but totally another issue if we want to use them for very serious applications.) Yes, it is fast - but only when its software has no bugs but have you ever heard that there is no such thing called bug-free software? Still upset about wrestling with the essentially non-functioning kiosks, and barely functioning ticket counter’s computers too, at the airport this morning. Even in the heart of silicon valley, we do not have competent computer software engineers! It is all North Korea’s fault!)
“Still upset about wrestling with the essentially non-functioning kiosks,”
Being "still upset " over it is a huge waste of time. It is what it is. Those of us who are frequent travelers don’t blink twice at these kinds of things. It seems as though you have a lot of anxiety when things don’t go fully perfectly and predictably. That’s why we told you to show up early. So you had a cushion so you could deal with the kiosks and still not miss the flight. You will drive yourself into an early grave if you let this stress you out.
Frequent international flyers like GMT and me have dealt with every possible inconvenience. Bad weather. Flights delayed for hours on end. Mix-ups with tickets. Lost baggage. This is nothing. This is a simple cross country trip by a young, healthy adult male. Don’t make life more stressful than it is.
Check your bags at the curbside check in. Usually those lines are shorter.
What other reason would you have for going to the ticket counter? You can print boarding passes out 24 hours before flights…and if you have smart phones you can usually just have them sent via text to your smart phone. No ticket line.
And agreed…get up 20 minutes earlier so you will have time for morning tea with your son.
It’s a busy travel weekend. And FYI…look at a calendar. Busy travel times include most holidays (thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas), as well as when there are school vacations (March is a doozie because of college breaks, Presidents Day weekend, April vacation).
And the least busy days to fly are Thursday and Tuesday. They also tend to be less expensive.
And always look for alternate airports to the big and always busy ones. You couldn’t pay me to fly out of LAX. It’s well worth the drive to Burbank. I also avoid SFO…preferring SJC, or even Oakland. I fly out of Hartford rather than Boston or any of the NYC airports,
I also tend to track my family as they travel across the country, and as far as I can tell from flight tracker, it takes at least 25 minutes from when the plane leaves the gate until it shows as in the air. Some of it may be “real”, in that once the doors are closed they do have to get those final people to actually stow their luggage and turn off their cell phones. Then they have the safety demo. Then they start taxiing.
Sometimes there are bubbles of busy at less busy airports. I think there is a bubble around 7am at SJ, as I think that is as early as they are allowed to leave from there. So there may be a few minutes backup on the taxi way.
I also wonder how quickly the flight tracker stuff is updated. Do they need to see the plane above a certain altitude to ensure it’s in the air, and not taxiing around? Do they wait for the airlines to update them. (I doubt this, as I’ve seen correctly showing planes still on the ground when the airline site claims they are landing at their next airport…)
The other thing to note on flight tracker is the length of the flight, when in the air, is often much smaller than the time the airline gives for an ontime flight. They count average taxi times into their schedules.
So,this is your SON who is traveling? Does he care if he gets home in time for dinner? My son could not care less about this…not at all. He travels when he can get a decent priced ticket, and doesn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn…unless absolutely necessary.
Re: weather related delays in the winter…when the air grid gets messed up…it gets messed up everywhere. Everywhere! Flying south doesn’t prevent travel issues. In fact, remember Atlanta? They don’t have the same snow removal equipment as places like Chicago, Boston, NYC, etc. those northern airports exoect snow, and they are well prepared to remove it. Southern airports…not so much so.
My so was flying once from Raleigh Durham to Chicago. His flight was canceled because they expected snow in NC.
Thumper is right. Remember the disruption at Chicago with the fire in the control center? That screwed up traffic everywhere because the plane you are taking from Houston to New York was stuck in position in Chicago because it couldn’t fly Chicago - Houston. Your wife is misinformed. A back-up in the system at any major airport reverberates throughout the entire system.
To check a flight all you need to do is enter, for example “united flight 322” into Google. You don’t need to bother going to a specific website.
There is commonly, especially on high traffic days like this weekend, a line-up for takeoff at the runway. So planes have left the gate but aren’t yet in the air. No point gluing to the computer (which is already making you stressed) to see when the flight departs. Chill really.
Living in a city with a large airport, most others don’t phase me. The only one that is a bit annoying because of the looooong walks is Charles DeGaulle. Ugh.
“Departure time” is defined as push back from the gate, not takeoff. As long the plane pushes back from the gate as scheduled, it can sit on the taxiway for hours and be technically considered an on time departure.
Like I posted earlier, the flight schedules are padded for taxiing, etc. The busier the time if day, the more padding.
Those kiosks that are partially used could be a risk to the safety of air travel! Since the legitimate traveler has used his credit card, etc., to get past authentication stage of the use of kiosk and it appears nobody is supervising those tons of “still in session” kiosks, a random person could continue using that machine to print the boarding pass. The TSA security is our only and last defense.
I think I indeed worry too much. This is because people could print out the boarding pass using the low cost printer at home also. It is very easy to print a fake one.
@thumper1, I did not see the curbside check-in when I was there today. It was not justified (from the airline’s point if view) to have it in today’s situation. It is just the malfunctioning of the computers seemingly everywhere at that airport that caused the delay. There were like only 4 travelers in front of us, but the total process time was as if there were 20-30 travelers. The agent at the ticket counter tried to use multiple computers in order to speed up the process because all computers were crawling (some could even totally hang) instead of running, they had a hard time in finding where the “labels” for baggages were printed - they walked around trying to find out where the labels were printed - You will agree that it was a mess if you were there and saw what was happening.
If there were a huge number of travelers, the whole check-in process could never handle it. The incompetent computer/IT engineers in the heart of silicon valley are incapable of managing their computers at airport today. (This is a major airline, AA. Not those little regional airlines.) Rant off.