Arrive early, airport warns

LR passengers miss flights by not planning ahead, it says

Patricia Almeida (left) of Dallas and Sheila Shields (center) of Little Rock wait in a security check line last week at the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field.
Patricia Almeida (left) of Dallas and Sheila Shields (center) of Little Rock wait in a security check line last week at the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field.

— The state’s largest airport continues to field passenger complaints about the congestion associated with its new and expanded screening facility, but officials from the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration say not all of the problem is in the airport or its federal security screeners.

Some of it, they say, is on the passengers. Follow-up reviews of filed complaints can’t substantiate the hour or more waits in the lines to go through the passenger screening area on the terminal’s second level.

Ron Mathieu, the airport’s executive director, said some passengers continue to arrive at the ticket counter on the airport’s first level less than an hour before their flights leave. Airlines and the airport regularly say passengers should arrive at the airport at least 90 minutes before their flight departs. Clinton National’s website warns passengers to arrive two hours early, citing ongoing construction.

“If you come here with 30 minutes or less and then you go to the ticket counter and then you go down the concourse to get at the checkpoint, there’s a pretty good chance you may not make your flight, if it’s at a peak period,” Mathieu told members of the Little Rock Airport Commission last week. “That’s not a failure of the airport or TSA.”

Still, the Transportation Security Administration has felt pressure from the airport and members of the commission, which has heard from a retired judge and a city board member, among others, about the long lines. In response, it has implemented a half-dozen changes, including regularly scheduling two screeners to check identification at peak times, according to Sari Koshetz, a spokesman for the agency. That only one screener had been checking identification at some peak times was a source of friction with passengers.

Bigger planes serving the airport and a 10 percent increase in passengers this year also have been factors in the heavy congestion some passengers have been regularly experiencing, airport officials said.

But so far neither the airport nor the Transportation Security Administration have documented anyone missing their flights who arrived at the airport an hour before departure or earlier. That was the case, Mathieu said, when authorities looked into a report in March that six people missed their flights because of the congestion in the screening area. Authorities are able to retrace people’s steps through the system beginning at the ticket counter, Mathieu said.

As recently as last week, a Russellville man complained to airport officials that he almost missed his flight because of an hour-long wait in the line leading to the passenger screening. Only through the beneficence of 25 passengers in line ahead of him did Stacy Carter say he was able to make his flight. He initially said he had hit the line at 9:35a.m. for a 10:40 a.m. flight.

Upon further review, it wasn’t quite an hour.

“I was a bit off on my original complaint regarding the time I got to the security line,” Stacy Carter said in an e-mail.

He actually hit the line at about 9:55 a.m. He snapped a photograph of the line from the escalator at 9:59 a.m., he said.

Still, he is like many passengers who are taken aback at the notion that they should expect any long lines, outside of a travel holiday, at Clinton National.

“It has never taken me 40 [plus] minutes to clear security at Little Rock,” said Carter, who has flown in and out of Clinton National for 15 years on an almost weekly basis.

Some commission members are inclined to agree.

“For a little airport like Little Rock, Arkansas, 20 minutes waiting in line just doesn’t make sense,” retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, a commission member, said at the May commission meeting.

Kay Kelley Arnold, another airport commission member, said the actual complaints don’t reflect the extent of the problem.

“Several of the complaints I have received in the last couple of months came from people who said, ‘I have timed it,’” she said. “It was more than 20 minutes, it was more than 30 minutes. I don’t understand the discrepancy but in one case, they timed it,it was 50 minutes. And they did not miss their flight, but at that time they are really not thinking about stopping and filling out a complaint form, they are trying to get to their plane.

“And they are angry and upset and they’re nervous because they are going somewhere ... and they want to get there.”

A rule of thumb the federal passenger-screening agency has developed is that when the line to the passenger screening area extends to the escalator leading down to the first level, it will take passengers approximately 29 minutes to make it through security, Koshetz said.

Airport staff members regularly monitor the lines on an almost daily basis and document when the lines extend to the escalator and beyond, according to e-mail reports obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. About 75 e-mail reports were sent by an airport customer- care representative from Dec. 22 through April 23. Of those reports, approximately a half dozen noted the escalators either had to be turned off or the line extended down the escalator and beyond.

On Feb. 17, for instance, the e-mail report noted, “I had to turn off the escalator at 5:15 a.m. The line continued to grow steadily and has been constant until 7 a.m. when I was able to restart the escalator.”

Some of the dates the escalator had to be shut down in late December and mid-March coincided with busy travel periods, such as Christmas and spring break. Twice during that time period, long lines appeared because of equipment breakdowns in the passenger screening area, according to the e-mails.

Other factors in the congestion are more passengers and bigger aircraft serving the airport.

Through the first four months of the year, 711,436 passengers have gone through Clinton National, according to airport data. That figure is 67,992 more than arrived and departed during the same period a year ago, or 10.57 percent more. Some airlines have swapped out regional jets, which seat about 50 passengers, with mainline jets, which can seat as many as three times the number of passengers as the regional jets.

“I think a lot of people have the feeling that this a small hub airport, that there shouldn’t be a line,” Mathieu told the commission. “But I remind the commission: We’re up over 10 percent in passengers this year. We’ve got larger airplanes all going out at the same time at peak periods. There are periods of time where we have several hundred people, [500] or 600 people, all at the checkpoint at the same time. Those things happen, which is a good thing. We want more passengers.

“[But] when that happens, when somebody comes here with less than an hour to go the ticket counter where there could be a line and to the checkpoint, where there is a line, there’s a good possibility they may not catch their flight.”

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 05/21/2012

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