Fears of long airport waits turn out to be mostly hype

Snarls relatively few for travelers hitting security check-ins.

Travelers who had braced for long lines and long waits were instead moving through most U.S. airports fairly quickly Monday, as the busy Memorial Day travel weekend drew to close.

“Honestly, it wasn’t too bad,” said Kendra Morehead of Wooster, Ohio, who flew from Detroit to Denver for a conference. “I got to the airport an hour-and-a-half early, but security only took like 15 minutes.”

She added, “I heard a lot of stories about security being understaffed, but everything seemed fine.”

However, the airlines weren’t ready to say “mission accomplished” yet, as it’s just the beginning of the busy summer travel season.

“Things have been going pretty well so far this weekend and we are working hard to make sure that we have no repeat of what we saw in Chicago,” said American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein, referring to Chicago O’Hare International Airport, which had some of the worst screening problems in recent weeks.

The airline continues to talk daily with the Transportation Security Administration to coordinate, Feinstein said.

The TSA began deploying extra canine teams to the busiest airports months ago. The dogs can screen large groups of passengers for explosives, eliminating the need to remove shoes and laptops, TSA spokesman Mike England said last week.

The extra dogs were concentrated at the nation’s largest airports, but they weren’t used for all screenings, meaning that many travelers still had to observe the usual procedures. England said the extra dogs would remain at security checkpoints well beyond the Memorial Day weekend.

In some parts of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, lines were nonexistent Monday and TSA employees outnumbered travelers.

Not everyone had a smooth trip, however. Bob Dunlap of Milford, Mich., expected to wait an hour to get through a security line that snaked from the Denver airport’s cavernous security plaza all the way to baggage claim.

“What can you do?” he said with a shrug. “I’ve never been in a line like this for security, ever.”

DAVID ZALUBOWSKI / ASSOCIATED PRESS Motorists sit in backed-up traffic on Interstate 25 in Denver on Friday as the Memorial Day travel weekend got underway. AAA estimated that about 38 million people would travel for the holiday, most of them driving.

RICH PEDRONCELLI / AP Marguerite Mosnier (right) hugs new Harvard psychology graduate Haley Washburn on Friday at the Sacramento, Calif., airport.