Once, when I was flying on stand-by, I missed a flight because it was full, and had to spend ~14 hours in the Honolulu airport, because I couldn’t afford to get a motel room, or anything else. All I had in my pocket was the return ticket. All I had was the water from the water fountain. The next flight I got the very last seat, and it was in the smoking section. Ugh. But, I took it. Fortunately, I was so exhausted from getting almost no sleep the previous day, I slept through the entire flight. It took hours to clear that shit out of my lungs.
This was 40 years ago.
If I don’t have checked in luggage I usually do one hour before take off.
On our recent trip home we were stood in the check in queue for two whole hours while nothing moved due to some problem with border control. The airline barely said anything about it, and when most other desks had cleared their queues ours had still barely moved. Ugh. But they did tell us that the flight wouldn’t be leaving without us.
Crackpot tinfoil hat time: TSA telling you to be there so early when it almost never takes that long to get through security is a conspiracy by the airport stores to get you to eat, drink, and shop more than you otherwise would if you timed it better.
The most boring yet most common type of conspiracy: Nobody planned this situation, but now that it exists and somebody is making money from it, we are going to drag our feet “fixing” the “problem.”
I mean, maybe? Big corpo business certainly has the ear of our government agencies. I wouldn’t be surprised if the request was made, and granted for an extra, generally unnecessary hour added to the recommendation.
I’m sure I sold my soul to the devil, but I did TSA PRE and CLEAR. I spend maybe 5 min going through security.
My soul wasn’t doing much anyway, but MAN is it nice to just breeze through without waiting.
Then I am in boarding group 38 where you are not allowed to carry anything more than your feelings onto the plane and your seat is behind the toilet. You have to get up every time someone wants to take a shit. I ain’t paying SHIT for a seat upgrade, fuck that.
idk the sheer volumes of shit what come out of me, i kind of prefer that seat
fun fact, the four hour figure comes from average wait times during a rush at LAX and then, for some reason, got applied to every airport at all times.
It saved my ass in Incheon when I went to the wrong terminal, spent 30 minutes walking around, had to spend 30 minutes on a bus going to the correct one, spent 30 minutes in line, then got delayed by another 30 minutes at check-in due to visa concerns, it was close enough they put me in the priority lane for security and I got to the gate literally as soon as my section was boarding.
It’s a well-managed airport, it’s just too damn big.
I live in a small town on an island with 8k people in it that has its own international airport. I arrive an hour before if I have checked bags, drop bags off, go home, pick up the family, drop them off at the airport, drop the car off next door at my work, walk back to the airport, walk through security and board the plane.
Nice, but that sounds like a hassle as well.
It sounds that way written down, but I suspect that the predictable easy access to the airport without large but unknown delays waiting for you really helps to ease the friction of each step and the anxiety leading up to them.
To make a stretch of an analogy, it kind of reminds me of my work situation. A few years ago I got a job with a new company that has the perfect location. It’s not just in my town but on my side of town. The drive is short and fun, like 6-7 minutes with most of that on a country road with turns and hills.
There’s no worry about getting back and forth, going home for lunch, running in on a WFH day to test on some hardware, leaving at the wrong time and getting stuck in traffic, etc.
I get the feel that the vibe with this airport on the island is similar.
Shit like this is why I avoid flying wherever possible. Such a miserable experience. I yearn for the day they finally somehow build that train tunnel across the Atlantic.
This is also why travelling by train can often be overall faster than plane, despite the train being slower. The station is in the middle of the city, no security check, the platforms are closer to the street, etc.
unless you’re in the US riding Amtrak. it’s never not been delayed for me, frequently by several hours
Several hours is surely an exaggeration. There’s actual data to disprove that.
I see two hours on average as the worst.
They said “frequently by several hours”, you’re talking about averages. Due to where I live, the only route I’ve taken regularly is on the list of worsts, and has definitely been several hours behind schedule on a significant proportion of the times I needed it.
I’m lucky if the Amtrak station in my relatively large city has a departure time during waking hours
yeah my last train was scheduled at 2am (only option out of my largeish city) and was delayed until 6am
If the two locations are close maybe, but most of the time I would say theyre not remotely as fast.
You can fly from New York to LA in 6 hours. On a train it would take like 3 days
Depends on what type of train it is. A passenger aeroplane travels around 800 km/hr, a ‘typical’ train about 150-200.
However, the highest average speed of a commercial train is reached by the Fuxing, which goes 320 km/hr, enabling to go from Beijing to Nanjing (1,020 km) in 3.2 hours. The Shanghai maglev used to go faster, about 430 km/hr. So a train can certainly be faster than a plane on mid-long distances if we take pre-flight time into account.
An experimental Maglev, the L0 Series, managed to go 600 km/hr. At that speed, you’re honestly directly competing with planes at long distances.
Meanwhile Amtrak trains: 74mph, unless you’re on the Acela, then top is 150mph.
Try closer to 30 average. Most rail isn’t rated for above 50 outside the Northeast Corridor, and you’re also pausing for hours at a time sometimes because freight rail gets priority treatment.
Not sure, and actually I think passenger gets priority, but there’s so few compared to freight it porb leans that way…
I still FUCKING LOVE Amtrak.
Legally passenger gets priority, however to increase the already disgusting profit margins and decrease capital expenditures (why spend on infrastructure when you can pay dividends and do stock buybacks), they have been running longer and longer trains without increasing the length of sidings so when a passenger train wants to pass a 2 mile long freight train, there’s literally nowhere the freight train can go to allow it to pass.
The DoT could fine the railroads each time they do that until they either run shorter trains or build the appropriate sidings, but they choose not to.
Only because US train system is biased toward freight.
Not complaining, it is what it is.
That said, I don’t see any pragmatic way to build passenger high-speed rail across the US. Every state would want it to run for them - otherwise they won’t support it. Then every city, etc.
Edit: for straight shots (point-to-point) across vast distances I don’t see train ever matching planes (like NY to LA)
NYC to LA is 4000km, so a dead straight non stop rail route operating at the current peak of high speed rail (200mph) would still take 12 hours. As soon as you pick a real route and stops and account for that speed being unrealistically expensive you’re looking at over 24h I think.
The annoying thing is that rail infrastructure is also expensive to maintain.
24 hours isn’t bad, I took longer sleeper trains in China.
Well it’s not going to be faster than 6 hour plane though 🤔
Either way you’re losing a whole day to travel, at least the sleeper train you save on a hotel room.
The US rail network is already kind of a disaster. A lot of major cities don’t even have passenger rail stations at all. There are entire STATES that don’t have a single amtrack station lol.
Just for clarity, this map doesn’t show all Amtrak stations. The cities pictured are just the big ones on the routes
we’re planning on taking my MIL on a train from seattle to phoenix and this helps a lot.
It would be most feasible to have like three high speed rails in the US. Up and down both coasts, and then east coast to west coast through the midwest, Denver, SLC etc.
That alone would be enough to replace a ton of car and plane trips, even if it didn’t provide service everywhere
We can’t even build a single HSR line anywhere in the US
We’re a long ways away from being able to even think about trans-continental HSR
We simply do not have the competence to do it
Okay yea “often” was bit of an exaggeration on my part
I suspect DekSomBoon is talking about sensible countries
If, in this context, “sensible” means “smaller than half of Texas” maybe…
100% I’ll just aim to be at the station 15-30min before boarding and even then I’m usually early
There is no way in the name of all that is good and holy in this fucking world I’m getting in a 3000 mile tunnel under the ocean.
Would it be any less safe than flying? Probably not. But for some reason I would rather fall out of the sky and die than be crushed and drown.
Honestly it probably would be way less safe because the network of pumps and fans and whatnot that would be needed to keep that tunnel both DRY and oxygenated would be insane. I’m also pretty sure the trains would need to be built like submarines to prevent the atmosphereic pressure from crushing them? Or maybe the tunnel? It honestly seems like an engineering nightmare.
If it were built at all, which it won’t be, a tunnel collapsing under the sea would be one of the most instantaneous deaths you could ask for. Like that billionaire tourist sub at the Titanic. Immediately crushed and gone.
Given that your dad had to pay for the plane tickets and probably won’t get any refund if you miss it, and flying is fucking expensive, I side with your dad on this.
My dad almost had a heart attack when I told him my flight was in 2 hours. Check in ended up taking 30 minutes and then I just waited for my flight.
I’ve never flown in the US; I live in the EU and generally aim for 2 hours if I have checked baggage, 1.5 hours if not. That usually causes me to still have significant waiting time after the security check, but better safe than sorry.
Airport and airline dependent. I’ve waited an hour and a half to check my car seat for a budget airline.
TSA are equal opportunity haters and don’t care if you got to the airport two hours ago and your flight is in 30 minutes. They tell you to get in their line 2 hours before your flight and by god sometimes they are gonna make you wait two hours.
Edit: oh yeah also waited an hour becuase my budget airline wouldn’t let me print boarding passes and said “see agent” but didn’t staff any agents. Turns out they want to make sure your one year old is actually a baby and you’re not just a cheapskate trying to hold a twelve year old in your lap.
Tell me you’re from Denver without telling me you’re from Denver
TSA tells you 2 hours, not 4. This person’s father is unwell.
person: posts an obvious, extremely common dad joke
you: their dad is a genuine danger to society.
you cannot be fucking serious.
…no. I’m not serious at all, and I didn’t say dangerous either, just unwell. Again though, not being serious.
Two hours is plenty. Never missed a flight and I’ve been on many dozens, unfortunately. If I want to eat, drink, or shop beforehand, pretty much anywhere is cheaper than an airport, so I’ll do it elsewhere.
Once in Seattle I showed up at the airport 3 hours early, didn’t realize there was a big game that had gone in the day before, and only baaaarely made it to my flight on time. Wasn’t even international.
It can definitely happen, especially in large cities. I suppose I’ve mostly combined luck with my laziness.
It’s also why I greatly prefer small airports, the smallest of which was literally a single room made of corrugated tin and little else. My flight left half an hour early.
Yeah small airports are great. Where I’m at now the local airport is pretty small, flights only go to/from Stockholm. They’re rarely even full I could probably just show up and grab a ticket like a fancy bus half an hour before takeoff. Sometimes there is a little stall selling local honey that’s just honor system nobody operates it and there isn’t any camera or anything just a wooden table and a paper with payment info lol
Sounds like I need to spend time in Sweden. My wanderings have been primarily equatorial.
Medium sized airports are the problem. Airports for big cities can handle tons of people. But you have an event in a mis-size city and it’s a disaster.
They actually only starts check in 4 hours prior to the flight. Don’t ask me how I know, I don’t have a life.
That must differ depending on airline/airport. I’ve never been able to check in sooner than 2 hours before any flight I’ve ever taken
In my experience it’s 3h…
What the hell are you talking about? They say 2 hours, not 4.
I aim to get there ridiculously early, and have a beer or coffee while I wait. There have been times when the airport train was cancelled, so I want to know that I have time to use an alternative route.
