I have taken three airplane trips in the last two weeks, and didn’t miss any of them. People ask me: “gosh, how do you do it? I’m always standing at the gate watching it taxi away, wondering if there was something I could’ve done.” Well, let me help. Here is how you make it to the plane on time.
Leave early. I set a personal record on the last trip, arriving at the airport 18 hours ahead of time. The danger, of course, is getting complacent - oh, no need to rush, I’ve seven hours. But seven turns into six, six turns into four, and before you know it you’ve a scant sole hour to make it from the waiting area to the gate, and you’re running through the airport. Please! Make way! They’re starting to board in 45 minutes! If I don’t get there ten minutes before my zone is called, I’ll be unable to stand around shifting my weight from foot to foot!
I’m not that bad. (Note: I am that bad.) While I did indeed arrive 18 hours ahead of time, most of those were spent in a Holiday Inn attached to the airport. Rather than rise early in Suffolk and spend two hours in a car gnawing nails to the quick because the highway is backed up between Halesworth (pronounced “Hales-worth”) and Leicestercastershire (pronounced “Lsta-shr”), you go in the day before and spend the night at the hotel. It will have a shuttle, so you can start your morning fretting that the bus is late.
Know your bag weight. It’s embarrassing to be over the limit. Fifty-two pounds? I can’t have stolen that much tinned jam from the breakfast buffet. I always pack at 45 pounds, so there’s room for souvenirs. This doesn’t include your personal weight, which is good; my phone has hundreds of new photos of very large historical monuments which weighed hundreds of tons. Sir, I’m afraid you’re over the limit. You’ll have to delete the entire series of pictures of Parliament and Westminster Abbey to make it under the limit.
Check the airport website obsessively. Good airports tell you how long the security wait is, right now, when you are not there. It will say “Five to Ten Minutes” right up until you get there, at which point it will switch to “Roughly the duration of the Pleistocene Era.”
Pack your carry-on carefully. It will speed the process if you don’t have a lot of suspicious-looking things in your bag. I’m always disconcerted when they don’t pull my backpack aside and put me in a small room for questions, because my bag looks as if it is wired for mayhem. They ought to take me to a small brightly lit room and ask questions.
“Why do you have so many cords and batteries?”
“Well, there are the drone batteries, the main backup batteries, and then the smaller ones for excursions.”
“Are you aware that we do have power here in Europe?”
“Yes, but it’s funny power. Not ha-ha funny of course but it’s in need of conversion. Doesn’t speak American. I’d say doesn’t speak English but your English currency is wonky too and by currency I mean the electricity not the money, although I’ll be damed if I can figure out why thruppence, which clearly denotes a third, is actually a quarter of a shilling -”
“Sir, you’re babbling like a nervous man who has something to hide.”
“Well we all have something to hide, don’t we? The inner recesses of the Id hold a thousand vials of secrets.”
“I see. And do any of these vials contain biological material, such as a toxin?’
“No - it’s a figure of speech. I don’t have any vials. Well, I’ve one, but it has mouthwash, and it’s in my checked luggage. More of a flask, really. But I’m sure your scanners looked at that cefore the bag went in the plane. Before! I meant before! I didn’t mean C-4, the powerful explosive! I don’t even know where you’d get that stuff. It’s not like that explosive available at rural fertilizer supply stores everywhere, and besides, you’d have detected that tell-tale residue unless I’d scoured everything with bleach, which I haven’t, because I don’t have any. Bleach. I mean I have bleach at home but I haven’t scrubbed my bag with bleach to remove the residue of my mouthwash. I’m not making the plane, am I.”
Finally: ask yourself what’s the worst that could happen, and plan accordingly. A car wreck might slow traffic to the airport, so consider alternate longer routes and build the time into your schedule, including booking a helicopter. A hundred people might be queuing to drop a bag, so consider wearing everything you’ll wear on the trip in multiple layers. There might be the entire performing troupe for Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” ahead of you at the TSA line, so check the nation’s orchestra websites to see if anyone’s performing that piece.
Then add an hour. Wait for an itchy sense of doubt to set in.
Add another. And consider taking a job at the airport so you’ll always be there already no matter what.
I alway arrive early, yet the airlines seem to have difficulty with departing on time. Then they blame it on weather, or ATC, or karma. But never the fact they create schedules that have them and every one of their competitors departing and arriving at the same time. It's a regular Angels vs pin topography who knew?
I would like to take up a collection to buy James and his wife a round-trip ticket on a small jet charter service. I have not had the luxury myself (yet?) but often dream of arriving at the airport on my own time, parking near the entrance to the private terminal, and enjoying a TSA-free and waiting line-free boarding experience. As it is, I loathe air travel, and the pain and stress are compounded for me as I literally cannot sit in economy class seats without my knees being jammed up against the seat in front of me.