Austin airport tells travelers to arrive 2.5 hours before flights
Already struggling to deal with an increase in passengers and with the peak summer travel season looming, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport leaders are now advising anyone flying out of Austin to show up two and a half hours before boarding domestic flights and three hours before international flights.
That adds 30 minutes to the airport’s previous advice, which was for passengers to arrive two hours before boarding domestic flights.
The airport extended the recommendation to two and a half hours because of ongoing Transportation Security Administration staffing shortages and high volumes of expected summer travelers, airport spokesperson Sam Haynes said Wednesday.
More:Additional TSA agents are in place at Austin’s airport; is that helping ease wait times?
The airport expects 30% more seats will be available on flights out of Austin-Bergstrom this summer compared with the summer of 2019, which was the busiest year to date, Haynes said.
“We used to say Thursdays, Fridays, Sundays and Mondays are the busiest days but what we’re seeing is peak travel days are no longer really a circumstance. Every day is a busy day,” Haynes said. “We just want travelers to be prepared, and we want them to show up with plenty of time for their flight and not have to worry about the stress of rushing to their gate and maybe missing their flight by 5 or 10 minutes.”
The increased wait time recommendation is the latest indication that the airport is still struggling with capacity, even after the TSA dispatched 15 additional officers to the airport in April in a bid to decrease security wait times for passengers. Airport officials said the additional staffers helped keep security lines from spilling outside the main terminal for a few weeks, but security lines once again extended outside the terminal on several recent days, including this past weekend.
The extra TSA staffing came after U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, sent letters on April 5 to the TSA and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency seeking help after what he described as an “embarrassing failure” at the airport March 28, when security lines spilled outside the main terminal onto the sidewalk and countless passengers missed flights.
Doggett said that, in wake of the recommendation that passengers arrive two and a half hours before boarding, he is urging TSA to enact substantive, long-term solutions for the situation at Austin’s airport.
“The situation in the Austin airport — both with new, incredibly long arrival recommendations, and with the continual delays of passenger screening until lines run out of the airport — is untenable and unacceptable,” he said in a written statement. “I plan to continue my ongoing work in urging the TSA to resolve it and staff our growing airport for our growing city appropriately. ”
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The 15 officers were added to the roughly 35 officers already temporarily stationed in Austin, meaning that as of late April there were 50 officers on temporary assignment at the airport, in addition to local TSA staff. Doggett’s office said the airport has also received additional canine units from the TSA to help expedite passenger screening.
Testifying before Congress this week, TSA Administrator David Pekoske said an additional 11 officers will be stationed in Austin starting Memorial Day weekend.
Patricia Mancha, TSA spokesperson for the southwest region, in April told the American-Statesman that agency would not provide exact number of staff members at the airport for security reasons. However, she said the additional officers and canine units assigned to Austin will remain there throughout the summer season.
According to Doggett, Pekoske said the agency has a national standard to process passengers through security screening within 30 minutes and would add more agents in Austin “as required” to meet that standard. Airport and TSA staff were not able to provide specific estimates for wait times at Austin-Bergstrom.
Mancha said the TSA is also continuing efforts to recruit new staff to work permanently in Austin, but she did not provide the number of positions the TSA is seeking to add or fill.
The airport’s website notes that “high passenger” days are days with 26,000 to 30,000 or more people flying out of the facility. The airport expects to serve a record-breaking 20 million passengers in 2022.
The airport has been playing catch-up for years, expanding its capacity as demand for flights out of Austin grows even faster. Austin-Bergstrom was last expanded in 2019, when the city added nine gates, increasing the number of outgoing passengers the facility was designed to accommodate to 15 million a year. That year, 17.3 million people flew out of the airport.
Haynes said the coronavirus pandemic made it difficult for the airport to project passenger trends but that expansion plans are in the works. The…
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