As travelers slowly return to the skies after the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, the nation's airlines are shifting some of their emphasis from luring back customers to ensuring that their travel experiences do not scare them away all over again.
The industry's chief focus remains tightening security, but airline executives said they are also trying to devise creative plans for efficiently moving people through lines that have been lengthened by additional screening of bags and identification. Despite passenger traffic that has been 25 percent below normal this week, waiting times at airports across the country have varied from slightly longer than usual to the worst that some fliers say they have ever experienced.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"As our volume and traffic returns, we're going to have to get better and better at this," said Pete McDonald, the senior vice president for airport services at UAL Corp, which owns United Airlines. "We're going to have to make sure travelers are not spending more time at the airport than getting to their destination."
For now, airlines are trying to do this by training thousands of additional workers to recognize legitimate ticket confirmations or ways to search suitcases. And even as the carriers lay off thousands of workers, they are keeping a higher ratio of employees to passengers at the airport because nearly every part of getting through an airport now requires more time.
"This is no small deal," said Dan Garton, the executive vice president for customer service at AMR Corp, which owns American Airlines. "Every airline is going to throw thousands of additional people at this process. We have no other choice in the time we have to respond."
For the longer term, airline officials say they will try to make structural changes to airports to cope with new security measures. They are taking a renewed look at technologies like retinal scanning or thumbprint recognition that might accomplish security screening more quickly than people can. The carriers are also studying how to reconfigure terminals to allow more space for the main security checkpoint and for identification and luggage checks at gates.
In the meantime, airlines are urging passengers to use curbside check-in and self-service computers that print boarding passes, both of which were temporarily shut down after the attack.
In recent days, the situation has varied greatly at airports around the county. Some passengers have arrived hours early only to find that they could get to their gates fairly quickly. "The lines are shorter than I expected them to be," said Angela Senft, a 28-year-old resident of Colorado Springs, Colorado, who arrived at Denver International Airport at noon Wednesday for a 4pm flight to Buffalo, New York, where she has a job interview.
But at other airports at other times -- sometimes only a half-hour or so after lines seemed manageable -- delays have exceeded even travelers' heightened expectations, they said. One problem is that both travelers and some airline employees still do not fully understand all of the new rules, like the carry-on limit of one suitcase and one small bag.
While the lines ebb and grow depending on the airport and time of day, many passengers said the biggest difference was the wait at the metal detector and baggage X-ray. "What has really changed is the security" area, said Avroy Fanaroff, a Cleveland doctor at Baltimore's airport Wednesday who has flown six times in the last month. "You need to allow 20 to 30 minutes to go through security."
The waits can sometimes be even longer, others said.
Patrick Woodson said the line that confronted him on Monday night at Southwest Airlines' security checkpoint at Baltimore/Washington International Airport reminded him of the college registration lines at the University of Texas in the days before computers.
"The line started at one end of the airport and [went] literally to the other end," Woodson, a political consultant in Austin, Texas, said. At one point, his wait seemed to be nearly over but the line then twisted into a children's play area and wrapped around itself four times.
"You felt like you're finally close, then you're going in the wrong direction," he said.
This has happened despite passenger levels that remain sharply lower than usual. But the declines are shrinking: Just two weeks ago, volume was off by more than 40 percent versus a year ago, according to the Air Transport Association, an industry group in Washington. Airline executives say advance bookings suggest that traffic is still rising.
As it does, the industry's challenges will increase. Airlines provided some of corporate America's worst-rated customer service even before security was tightened, although both customer complaints and flight delays were starting to decline this summer.
In part, airline officials say, people will simply have to adjust to the more cumbersome security ritual. In addition to checking tickets, bags and identification more rigorously than before, airlines have abandoned some of their recent, much-heralded strategies to simplify traveling.
Like other carriers, Delta Air Lines has indefinitely discontinued its "virtual check-in," in which travelers used the Internet to register for a flight from home or work and then present only their frequent-flier card at the airport. Since Sept. 11, each passenger must show a boarding pass, ticket or printed confirmation to get past security and to their gate.
Midwest Express Airlines, a moderate-sized carrier known for its wide leather seats and good service, now gives away coffee and three different newspapers near the gates in its Kansas City, Missouri, Milwaukee, Wisconson and Omaha, Nebraska hubs. Now the airline is considering adding other drinks and publications, food and possibly Internet terminals.
Passengers "are going to be in that gate area for a longer period," said Thomas J. Vick, Midwest's chief marketing officer. The airline wants "to create a different environment than people are used to," he added.
Still, the longer waits will cause some travelers to reconsider taking certain flights, like those for weekend jaunts or short business trips.
"The mindset of people has clearly changed," said Philip G. Dunphy, the senior manager of corporate travel at Pfizer Inc in New York. Pfizer employees in the US are now taking about 20 percent fewer trips than they did before the attacks, while use of the company's videoconference equipment has almost doubled and more people are taking trains between New York and Washington.
Dunphy said he expected Pfizer's airline travel to rise in the coming months but that it would not soon reach its previous level. When people discuss whether to take a trip, he added, "There's a new definition to `need.'"
Airline executives are hoping that technology will help them reduce waiting times as the traffic continues to increase.
In the last few years, the largest carriers have begun installing self-service kiosks that resemble bank ATMs, primarily at hub airports. The units let passengers print their own boarding passes and often skip the airport's longest line, at the main ticket counter.
People show identification when boarding the plane.
This summer, United put 91 units at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago and 83 at Los Angeles International Airport. On Sunday, 798 people used those machines at the curbside at O'Hare, the largest number since they were installed on July 31, the company said.
For now, many passengers said they were happy to see the additional security and recognized that the conflict between safety and efficiency was likely to remain for years.
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