After travel chaos Saturday, BWI returns to almost normal with shorter lines

Normality returned to Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport late Sunday morning, with security lines taking travelers just a few minutes.

Earlier Sunday, the lines at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints stretched outside for up to two hours, but they were nothing like Saturday, when some flyers reported waiting more than four hours.

Airport officials recommended Sunday that travelers arrive at least three hours before their scheduled flights, shortening their earlier guidance of four hours as they expected lines to “remain longer than normal.”

But as of midafternoon, people were reporting waits of 20 to 25 minutes.

Concourses A, B and C — serving American and Southwest Airlines — had been most impacted and plagued by long lines until Sunday.

After seeing videos of long, winding lines at BWI on Friday and Saturday, traveling friends Kate Martin and Dayna Crawford arrived at BWI more than five hours ahead of their Southwest flight to Florida on Sunday.

“After the videos we saw from yesterday, we were expecting it to be much longer,” Martin said.

They packed snacks, water and portable chargers to prepare for an hourslong wait. Martin showed up hours ahead of her children, and her parents who live in Howard County, to get a sense of how bad the lines would be.

“We didn’t want to risk missing the flight,” she said.

Over the last week as spring break began during an ongoing partial federal government shutdown, airports were left understaffed and wait times at BWI have increased from minutes to hours.

Thousands of TSA workers have gone without pay for more than five weeks. It’s the second time they’ve gone unpaid for weeks because of a government shutdown in the last six months.

More than 500 workers have quit, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to pay TSA workers as soon as Monday. Still, more than 35% of BWI’s TSA workers called out Saturday.

DHS did not respond immediately to a request for Sunday’s callout numbers.

Adding to the chaos of spring break travel is the arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at BWI and other airports nationwide.

ICE officers were deployed to the Baltimore airport Saturday afternoon to provide “operational support” to TSA personnel, according to a news release from the Maryland Aviation Administration.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said on social media that the ICE agents are there only to speed the security clearance process, not for immigration enforcement.

On Friday, an abrupt temporary ground stop due to an odor at a shared air traffic control center added to the pandemonium at BWI, Reagan National Airport and Dulles International Airport.

Although BWI is recommending arriving at least three hours before departure times, some who traveled Saturday said four hours wasn’t enough time to make their flights.

But Southwest is notifying its BWI customers Sunday to arrive two hours before domestic flights and three hours before international travel.

Jelani Jenkins, a former linebacker with the Miami Dolphins and a Prince George’s County resident, showed up at BWI more than seven hours ahead of his flight to Phoenix after seeing people share what he called “horror stories” on social media.

Jenkins is heading to a business conference for professional athletes. It’s a big opportunity for him, he said. “So it’s one of those things where I knew I could not miss this flight.”

Although there were lines earlier at security checkpoints for concourses A, B and C, they’d all but disappeared by 11 a.m., when Jenkins had arrived. And concourses D and E — home to Delta, Frontier and Spirit Airlines — had no lines Sunday.

Jenkins said he didn’t regret showing up early because he figured his Sunday, lines or no lines, would be “an airport day.”