I use O'Hare airport, one of the ten worst airports in the US. I never take a whole 45 minutes to get to my gate. Nor do I have any precheck or anything. I just pack light and check in online. Baggage dropoff and claim is what kills you.

I travel about once a month to the US and back to Canada... the security lineup can take up to an hour sometimes leaving SFO. So if I don't want to have a chance to miss my flight, I have to arrive 2 hours early really.

did you sign up for tsa precheck and/or clear? If you travel that much the amortized cost would make sense. You basically get inserted into the line right after the "check id" part and don't have to take off shoes/ laptops

To/from Canada might want to look into NEXUS. Slightly more money but you get precheck, and immigration line skip both directions.

I'm assuming this is the international terminal? I fly ATL->SFO every 3 weeks or so and SFO domestic is the fastest airport ever. I'll leave downtown SF at 1 and get to airport, drop my bag off and be at gate in ~30 minutes.

ATL on the other hand....even with TSA pre I can take a full hour.

SFO is the only airport manned by private security instead of TSA, that is the reason it is super efficient.

I've cleared from the entrance through security to my (domestic) gate at SFO twice in ~15 minutes. It really blows my mind how they pull that off.

Better training, more incentives to be passenger focused etc. might be the reasons.

In fact in some contests these private guards performed 5x better than TSA employees in catching the bad guys/bad items while actually doing it lot faster.

For ATL - you can go in through international terminal and take the tram to the domestic gates. There is just less parking on the international side.

Wow, I just flew out of IAD and even though I arrived at 4AM for my 5:15 flight, security still took 45 minutes. The line was already twice as long by the time I got through.

I don't even want to think about trying to get through at a reasonable hour.

Oh, I always arrive early. No reason to take the risk, I can always sit and read a book. But I spend a lot more time waiting than I ever have getting to the gate. It's really just an overabundance of caution.

Many people (including me) consider the imposed waiting at the gate time part of the travel time. Whether from an abundance of caution or rational reaction to the wide variability of security procedures (and ground transport), it's still part of the total trip time.

That's fair. Though I've yet to actually need that time, so I feel arriving at the airport with less than an hour to go is a realistically acceptable thing I could do.

In Salt Lake City I recently saw on the local news that our airport recommended arriving 3 hours early for your flight. At the end of the report the news-caster said that SLC airport had below average wait times, as if that was suppose to make me feel better. It didn't.

"Things are bad here, but the good news is it's worse everywhere else." \s

At SFO you can go from entrance to on-plane in 40 minutes for a transatlantic flight.

I like SFO.

At SFO, the trick is getting from your origin elsewhere in the Bay Area to the entrance in the first place.

I found BART to make this pretty straightfoward when I lived in Berkeley.

Also, when flying to Sacramento recently I took the Norwegian Air trip from Gatwick to Oakland and then capitol corridor to Sacramento. Didn't even need to get on BART; the airport connector took me to the catwalk to Amtrak.

The only airport in the bay that seems hard to access is San Jose, which has less service anyway.

15 minutes without traffic or 30 minutes with traffic from SF to SFO isn't bad at all.

Here's a map with travel times: http://www.trulia.com/local/94128/driving:1%7Ctransit:0%7Cpo...

Move the pointer to central SF (and Trulia will assume you have instant access to the freeway). 30 minutes with no traffic. Not 15.

But anyway, I was talking about the entrance.

30 minutes would barely get you from central SF to the airport ramp with a mostly empty 101.

But that's not the problem. Getting parked and a shuttle in will be at least 45 minutes, if you get a shuttle faster than normal.

Taking BART to SFO entrance: check the schedules. You'll be surprised how much of the day it doesn't run at all.

This must be why I always Uber to the airport. On normal days (not big travel day like Thanksgiving time) you can get from SoMa to Standing Outside SFO With Luggage Out of Trunk in about 30min during the day. I've seen as low as 15min at night.

I may have always gotten lucky and when I actually plan the trip I try to go for more like 45min travel-to-airport-time. Just to be sure.

On Thanksgiving or such, the off-ramp from 101 to SFO takes about an hour. That's crazy.

Depended heavily on the airport layout and how close you want to cut it on the departure side. Avoiding checked bags is a significant timesaver.

I missed a few flights doing this but pre-9/11 it was definitely possible (but not advisable) to get to a smaller airport 30-45 minutes before departure and make the flight.

On the arrival side, back in the good old days (mid to late 90's?) with no checked luggage I could get from the arrival gate to Hertz #1 club gold rental car pickup (when it was in the terminal A garage) at SJC without breaking stride - probably 5 minutes max from the aircraft door to car door.

Post-9/11 it was often possible to make weekday morning flights at OAK arriving only 20 minutes before. (I did it a number of times!) Self-print Southwest boarding pass, almost no security line, everything is 3-4 minutes' walk from everything else.

Nowadays OAK has been expanded and the security lines are longer (and they have body scanners, which I opt out of, which also then takes longer).

I've gotten out of SFO in 30 mins (post-9/11), no checked bags obviously, boarding pass in hand, with most of that time spent in screening. This is also a good way to be the last person on the plane or miss it entirely.

Mid-1990s, traveling with my graduate advisor. His wife drop us off at the small airport, no more than about 15 minutes (!) before departure. We walked with our carry-on luggage through a quick metal detector/baggage X-ray, and checked in at the gate. About five minutes later the airplane door closed, for takeoff.

I still remember worrying about how close we cut it, but he'd done it many times and knew how long it would take.

I often fly out of a smaller airport in Upstate NY. For a morning flight, my routine is to set my alarm for 1:15 before the flight takes off. I get up, pack, and am out the door about with about an hour to go. I get to the airport with about 45 minutes to go, and arrive at the gate in time to wait 20 minutes to actually start the boarding process.

With precheck, most airports aren't much worse, other than the uncertainty of transport in. I've never had precheck take me longer than about 10 minutes in security. So as long as I'm not checking a bag, it's still pretty reasonable to arrive 45min before departure.

Many small airports outside of the U.S. work like this. I can turn up 20 minutes before a flight with luggage to check and board an intercity flight without any security. It depends on the size of the plane, small planes are deemed safe enough to fly without metal detecting the passengers.

You could get into Sacramento's airport in 45 minutes in the 90s, although that would be cutting it close. And even today, you can walk out with carry-on only in about 10 minutes, with the expensive parking close to the bridgeway into the terminal.

However, an hour and a half to get in with TSA "at your service" feels like cutting it really close, and I'm talking about "Smurf" (SMF), not San Francisco or San Jose.

I've been able to get from the airport entrance to my gate in under 30 minutes. It was around 2am going from LAX to PHL and there was a long-ish (maybe 20 min wait??) line behind us at security. We still waited another 45 minutes at the gate. So 1 hour on the departure end is reasonable. At arrival I don't see 1 hour being unreasonable either.

TSA Pre-Check plus no checked bags feels like some sort of travel revolution

Probably not to people who remember travelling before 9/11 (and probably even less to people who remember travelling before the security measures implemented during the 1990 gulf crisis that continued until superceded by post-9/11 security.)

You used to be able to go through without showing any documents, and so friends and family members could come through security to meet arriving passengers at the gate (or say goodbye to departing passengers at the gate!).

One time as a non-passenger I went through security at BDL two or three times either because of confusion about where to meet someone or just in order to buy food on the other side. The security guards didn't seem to think this was improper.

I remember early-90s BDL also. The security guards were pretty relaxed. We enlisted their help in faking out a younger sibling who didn't know we were going to Disney World; they played along that we were just going to meet someone at the gate, and let someone else take all the bags through ahead of us. Wouldn't be remotely possible now.

Then again, I also remember when kids were routinely let into the cockpit, either before takeoff or while cruising.

Air travel used to be almost fun.

When I was a kid air travel was great fun! I got to visit the cockpit in every plane we flew in, including the Concorde. As a curious child, this was absolutely wonderful.

Ah well, it seems that those days will never return.

Cockpit visits are still allowed on the ground, it's only in flight that it's no longer possible.

Well that's good, at least.

I still remember when I was fortunate enough to failover to a concorde when our 747 was grounded ~20 years ago and got to visit the cockpit in flight. There was a seam between two portions of the cockpit (a little less than an inch wide) that only existed when the plane was supersonic, and it closed tight when not.

Wouldn't have been able to scare a kid into thinking they could get their hand stuck in there if the plane was still on the ground ;)

Of course whether or not in-flight cockpit visits were still allowed, that particular experience wouldn't happen anymore.

Oh yeah, I remember being invited to visit the cockpit once as a kid (I don't remember whether it was on the ground or in-flight). I guess it was common on some airlines for the flight attendants to look around for kids and invite them up to meet the pilots.

Apparently in the 1960s to early 1970s, you could buy your ticket on the plane. (I wasn't around to have experienced that.)

Around that same period was the peak for plane hijackings - almost one per week in 1969. Cuba was the typical destination, 34 times that year.

<I also remember when kids were routinely let into the cockpit>

I wasn't a kid, but I got to hang out in the cockpit for a good-half hour on a cross-province Air Canada flight long after it was illegal in USA airspace (1990s). The amazing thing, apart from the scenery, was that you could see dozens of other jets in various headings and altitudes.

I used to walk through security barely slowing down and get on my flight without ever showing ID to anyone or checking in anywhere. And all the seats had actual knee room. I miss that feeling of freedom I used to get from air travel.

It's the same as pre 2003 travel. Just, now you have to pay for it...

Post TSA, I've shown up to a Florida airport ~15 minutes before takeoff and have made it.

Extremely lucky (mistake on person who bought my ticket's end) but it happened.

Red eye flights at Long Beach. Went through TSA in like 5 minutes. Seriously.

Yeah flying out at odd times and/or odd days can save you a lot of frustration dealing with the TSA lines. The worst of the lines are due to commuter or holiday traffic 99% of the time and the rest of the time you can breeze right up to the scanners and be through in a few minutes.

They kind of have to advertise the worst wait times though because if they say 1 hour non peak and 3 hours peak the times the airport or the traveler gets it wrong the airport will catch the blame.

Really? TSA pre-check, carry-on only or already have your baggage tags printed out, go through security like you've done it before (don't wait until you are about to go through the backscatter machine to take off shoes, belts, etc). Outside of the busiest airports or high-travel dates, shouldn't ever take more than 45 minutes.