At LaGuardia and Kennedy, TSA checks approach something close to normal

What a difference a few days and TSA agents getting paid can make.

Last Wednesday evening, people with flights booked out of LaGuardia Airport's Terminal B arrived to find a sea of fellow travelers standing in security lines that snaked through the terminal. Estimated wait times were between 2 and 2 1/2 hours.

Late Monday afternoon at La Guardia, Arun Swaminathan stood among others entering a security checkpoint, above which a sign read that he would pass through TSA in one minute. He arrived 3 1/2 early for his flight to Denver, in anticipation of a much longer wait. Knowing he would breeze through the checkpoint, felt "so good and so bad," said Swaminathan, 47, of Wilton, Connecticut.

"It’s so good that it’s just one minute," he added. "But now that my flight is also delayed, I have to go and sit for another four hours."

At Kennedy Airport, the scene was similar late Monday. Security lines moved at a brisk pace. Transportation Security Administration officers, wearing a TSA badge on their familiar blue uniforms, checked luggage and screened passengers.

Both airports had returned to something approaching normal after many TSA officers, unwilling or unable to work without a paycheck amid a federal government shutdown, stopped showing up.

Tens of thousands of TSA employees nationwide had been working without pay since funding from the Department of Homeland Security ended in mid-February. Officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency congressional Democrats want reformed before they greenlight homeland security funding, were seen Monday patrolling both Terminal 5 at Kennedy and Terminal B at LaGuardia.

Last week's crash between a landing Air Canada Express jet and a fire truck on a La Guardia runway killed the pilot and co-pilot, injured several others and exacerbated an already bad situation inside the crowded terminals as the runway shutdown delayed arriving and departing flights. The affected runway reopened Thursday.

TSA workers started getting paid again Monday after President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order in an effort to ease the lengthy security lines.

Knowing this, Gabriela Cambiasso, who spent the past several days visiting friends in Manhattan, said she decided to ignore an email from JetBlue advising her to arrive three hours ahead of her domestic flight to Chicago out of Kennedy.

"They told me three hours, but I thought they are exaggerating because they are paying [TSA agents] now," Cambiasso, 56, of Chicago, said. "If I am two hours early I should be fine."

Playing it safe, Daniel Matos heeded JetBlue's advice, arriving four hours before his flight from Kennedy to the Dominican Republic.

"It’s good, it’s empty right now," Matos, 26, of the Bronx, said as he peered at the line of passengers walking through the JetBlue queue toward the security checkpoint. The electrical engineering major attending City College of New York added that he can spend some time in Terminal 5 studying.

"I was expecting to stand like three hours in the line," Matos said. "But right now it looks like 15 minutes, 20 minutes, that’s it."

With AP