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)
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.
Nothing compares of course to traffic on 90/355/190.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
So unless its an intra-EU flight, it's still 3 hours affair just to depart.
The most infuriating is flying to EU with my non-EU biometric passport. It has all my data and photo encoded in the chip, my remaining visa days count is in the system - let me just scan it at the automatic gates and speed up control! But no, fuck me I guess, go to the slowass line to the customs, where a sleepy officer will do the same thing as I would have done myself and simply swipe the passport through the machine and proceed with that info. And maybe try to bullshit me with some inane questions. "Oh, you don't remember an arbitrary number of letters and digits written in your ticket, and which one can read any time if needed? That's suspicious!".
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?
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.
Doesn't matter, I'm wired the same way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is PDX, not the biggest airport but not a tiny one either.
She ended up getting it after the last incident.
Of course, you might end up waiting an hour for the chair.
I’ve talked to touring musicians who say they aim for 15 minutes before boarding.
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?
- Salad A: Cut celery bite size, add lemon and salt to taste.
- Salad B: Cut cucumber in slices, add yogurt, spritz of vinegar, salt and pepper, small spoonful of sugar. Search Gurkensalat for decent instructions.
- Main A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuffed_peppers
- Main B: Any good cabbage stew / soup recipe, looks awful, is delicious.
- Main C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moussaka
I'm guessing you do not patronise Indian restaurants; they usually have tons of good vegetarian dishes, including several vegetable-forward ones.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I can walk into an electronics store with 300$, walk out with a drone, unbox it on the train to Heathrow, and then shut down the airport by flying the drone over the tarmac, delaying thousands of people for hours and causing millions in damages from forcing diversions and planes to circle. It's just such an incredibly fragile infrastructure and ecosystem.
61% of this year's accidents come from the U.S. and Europe. Unless you want to play the 'no true Scotsman' game with "modern" safety standards that no one really meets for more than a few miles. (For that matter, I'm not aware of current networks that can reliably defend against operator error, let alone actively suicidal operators.)
> not to mention incidence of suicide,
Dozens of accidents and hundreds of deaths a year on that list, even though it explicitly excludes individual suicides.
> (the modern solution is just not have trains at surface level, either above or below).
Talk about colossal $$$$$ for tracks running outside of urban centers.
> Talk about colossal $$$$$ for tracks running outside of urban centers.
Well, that's the opposite of what I mean, I'm talking about urban centers. Which, really the actual solution is just stop letting cars into cities where they can drunk drive crash into people and streetcars, which they do so often you'd think it's their hobby. Anyway, plane infrastructure is still more expensive, still a worse experience, and still has a higher environmental cost. There's just no sensible justification for maintaining all this plane infrastructure. It's an accident of capitalism that it's gotten this far.
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...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there should be no security checks - but it has to be astronomical.
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.
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.
Airplane fuel is subsidized? I thought it was taxed in the US.
I was lied to, did not do my research, then lied to everyone here instead, sorry.
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.
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
Because what's the alternative - airports pinky promise that they really, really won't have any passenger intake delays, then it magically becomes true?
ktallett•6mo ago
nv-vn•6mo ago
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newAccount2025•6mo ago
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esseph•6mo ago
cosmicgadget•6mo ago
jdietrich•6mo ago
ktallett•6mo ago
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.
jltsiren•6mo ago
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.
hhh•6mo ago
brewdad•6mo ago
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.
hhh•6mo ago
SpaceNoodled•6mo ago
impossiblefork•6mo ago
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.
ktallett•6mo ago