Reply #13: Why arrive early to wait?

[Bragi]

You say you plan to leave for vacation Wednesday morning, and feel now that it might be good to arrive the full 3 hours early for the flight, largely because of security considerations.

This seems like a sensible thing to do, if you take as a whole all the changes to routine travel experience that have been engineered into the flight experience post 9-11. The idea of arriving early as a contingency, in case of delay, seems well founded. At first glance.

Except wait a minute. When there are delays -- say, for example, if someone decides to fly the ashes of a deceased loved one, friend, relative for internment somewhere, and security hasn't a clue how to handle this not-surprising event, which freezes the system for 90 minutes -- when this routine kind of thing happens, it turns out that anyone who arrived 3 hours early for the flight leaves at exactly the same time as the traveller who arrived much later.

So there you go. Guess which of the above passenger the security mavens and the airlines prefer? The early arriver, of course. And what are the benefits of being in the early group, compared to cutting your travel time by arriving just in time?

Hmmm. Not sure about the benefits. Maybe someone can help out. I think I'd rather arrive just in time rather than be there well ahead of time.

- B