Tag: Security

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Culture Travel

Day 1871 and Private Terminals

The downside of living in a world where everyone posts all their luxuries, is regular people who spend too much time on Instagram worrying about things that wouldn’t add much to their lives. Instagram breeds discontentment for everyone.

My husband grew up ten minutes from a global international airport hub, and as such has unrealistic expectations of how quickly one can get from place A to B and how many legs a trip should have.

He longs for the most efficient trips complete with special passes, lines and hopefully a plane dedicated to just his crew and their final destination. I doubt I’ll manage to buy it for him but if one of my better seed investments pans out I’d acquire a gulfstream for his buddies to fly.

I’ll admit I’ve been a little spoiled as well, as by the time my family could afford to fly more regularly the old Stapleton airport had been replaced by a global United hub in Denver International Airport. A spookier more haunted airport there has never been (mind the killer blue Mustang and Masonic symbolism) but it flys connections everywhere.

Now we are in the spokes and farther from hubs. Flying can be a challenge for me as in the past fewer people abused disability requests like wheelchairs.

My ankylosing spondylitis has good days and bad days so on occasion I wish I had help with heavy bags, long lines and lugging stuff around.

Wheelchair access has alas become just another scam people run to board first, so I can no longer guarantee that I’ll even make my airplane given the lines and lines of maybe crippled as if you log disabled you often can’t even get your boarding pass from a kiosk. You have doomed yourself to the thousand person line.

Alas become used to popping Advil, throwing elbows and working my way to the front of the line filled with folks who know little of flying etiquette, status boarding times and the rest. If I can’t beat back a Balkan auntie seated in the back of the plane for my own seat at 2C then what sort of world traveler am I? I claim space but I don’t like it.

Yet as I stomp around smaller spoke airports I’ve learned it’s not too expensive to get a priority pass to private terminals. Groan I know.

In a few spots, it’s less than fifty bucks to skip check in with your airline, avoid security and passport checks with the whole airport by doing it in these terminals and they will drive you in a van to board the airplane first.

That means no more fighting for prime position in line to get prime position to board to get prime position on the bus to race up the staircase to the airplane before someone else blocks you.

I can’t imagine a better use of the time and money frankly. I could easily have arrived much later but I wasn’t sure how easy it would or wouldn’t be.

The demographic feels a bit petty oligarch with a cigar lounge and exotic alcohol but I’m just happy I haven’t had to do any heavy lifting for the moment. My bags are handled. I have food and water.

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Travel

Day 1790 and On The Road Again

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving is a weird day for travel. If you could get the whole week off, chances are good you already traveled over the weekend. If you couldn’t swing the time off, you are probably running with the masses on Wednesday.

Those only taking one day off of work is a bit of a no man’s land for transit. I am oddly in that camp this year. For many years I worked Black Friday and simply didn’t consider any portion of the week a holiday.

I’m lucky that the Bozeman airport is one of the most pleasant airports in all of America. I breezed through security with a golden retriever puppy behind me and a chocolate lab puppy in front of me.

Part security you have gorgeous views of the Bridgers, friendly people, hilarious warnings to leave your bear spray behind, and a spot to get a wood fired pizza before takeoff that is actually good.

The woman checking my bag in said the record was 30 confiscated in a day but the most she had personally handled was 5 of them.

Even more exciting was finding I’d been upgraded to first class on my commuter flight. Sometimes you do just get lucky when you hit the road.

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Travel

Day 1715 and My No Good Horrible Very Bad Transit Day

As I often do on transcontinental travel days, I wrote my post for the day first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how the journey would go so I thought “let’s post this early” in case things get hairy. And boy did it.

I was leaving Europe just as Poland closed its airspace after a Russian drone attack. Tensions were already high as Israel had attacked Hamas inside Qatar’s capital of Doha. Greyzone war that blur attacks on national sovereignty through target or weapon choices make everyone twitchy.

It’s a weird thing to complain about air travel on 9/11, but I don’t think much of the security theater we’ve accepted over the years did much to keep my transit safe yesterday. Twenty four years later we go through the motions of keeping air travel safe from terror because what else are we going to do?

In fact, it didn’t seem as if security was particularly tight yesterday so much as particularly incompetent. It was chaotic confusion everywhere from passport checks to boarding flights.

I had a Frankfurt to Chicago polar day flight, along with a positioning flight on each side. I went through a lot of security screenings and passport checks yesterday and stood in more lines than I can count.

In Frankfurt the lines were so long that even with planned two hour airport transit time, I was among the last to board my flight.

The “special purposes” line I begged my way into as my inbound was delayed by fog was glacial in its pace. It seems the new transit grift is wheelchairs. So perfectly abled people are now pretending at disability to board early and use special security screening lines.

It left wishing I’d registered my real disability as I attempted to run the two miles of the international terminal with suitcase and backpack torquing my spine so I wouldn’t miss my flight to Chicago.

Deplaning at Chicago I couldn’t even count the full set of wheelchairs waiting.

Add in enormous confused families using the special purpose line, who spoke neither German nor English, with 3-4 bags a piece and every sort of banned item from pocket knives to 1.5l bottles of liquids and I am shocked anyone made it through security to their flights on time.

I watched a foursome of black Arabic speaking grandmothers in hijabs and wheelchairs shouting at German security guards and their extended families as I waited for my turn. Their fierce attitudes did not speed anything up that I could tell.

I saw them 9 hours later gathering somehow even more checked luggage upon arrival in O’Hare. I’m glad my Global Entry let me pass them by at passport control as I did not want to be behind them again.

Not that I got through Chicago’s security lines unscathed. The TSA pre-check lines were four times as long as the regular line. Figuring I was well packed I could handle the normal line. Naturally I got randomly selected and unpacked basically everything

As I stood in my socks waiting for the agents to stop gossiping and listen to the only working agent explain to them that “yes that the ice pack was for medications so they can move this along” I got an alert on my phone that the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk had been shot.

I wandered in a daze to the United club where I was denied entry. This despite booking a business class ticket for the entire transit through their own hub via their Star Alliance partnership with Lufthansa, I couldn’t use the club as “the last leg of my flight didn’t qualify.”

I knew this was possible as this last leg issue happened to me on my last transit through O’Hare so I’d bought a day pass ahead of time. But they weren’t honoring those as it was too busy. I schlepped to another club in the terminal where they were still letting in day passes. There I listened to scared speculation from two blonde women about Mr Kirk’s status.

Another hour later I made my way onto my flight to Montana. I decided to just jump to the front of the line as I was in first with seat 2B. If everyone is ignoring lines then it was irrational to keep trying to politely queue.

As the plane boarded it was all talk of Mr Kirk. A news alert crossed my phone saying he had been killed.

A gentleman was playing a video of stitched together angles of footage on his phone with full audio on. You could hear the bullet hit again and again.

The cabin attendant told him to turn it off, saying sir please have some respect for the dead. A few hours later, still living, I made it home to Montana.