| HN Mirror

Nope, I spend as little time in the airport as possible. For domestic (US) flights, I target arriving ~30mins before boarding begins if not checking a bag. I typically find security takes around 5 minutes (TSA Pre-Check). I typically fly out of SFO although of course at least half my flights are coming home so I'm flying out of some other random airport. When things are REALLY bad, it's 15 minutes, which still leaves me 15 minutes with nothing to do. And that's before boarding begins. There is still around 30-45 minutes before the gate close, of additional buffer time.

I typically fly United and have their lowest tier frequent flier thing (silver), which means I get priority access baggage check for when I am checking a bag (go to kiosk, scan boarding pass, tag bag, drop at baggage drop). But even without that, you sometimes wait 5 minutes for a computer to print your bag tag.

For international flights, of course, it's more. Usually 1h+ before boarding begins.

Amusingly, my 3 worst experience were when I arrived super early and still barely made my flight. One was an Uber driver from Valparaiso Chile to the Santiago airport, who could NOT find where to drop me off, and I was trying to guide him, but I didn't know any Spanish. No joke, we drove around the runway multiple times.

2 others were on the same trip and both in Germany. Berlin Brandenberg, arrived exactly 2 hours before departure as EasyJet told me to do (counters do not open until 2h before). Bag drop took all of 2 minutes, and then I stood in a security line for at LEAST 1h20mins. Absolutely pants-on-head-insane. Other one was flying out of Frankfurt, opted to splurge on a taxi instead of public transit because I was excited to begin my journey home. Arrived at least 2 hours before the flight. Stood in a Lufthansa bag check line for well over an hour, it went absolutely nowhere. Panicked, found baggage check to have moved to another terminal for international flights (the adjacent bag check windows across the hallway were closed for construction) .. checked bags quickly, and still ended up having to navigate MULTIPLE lines for security that appeared to be correct but were so long (hundreds of meters) that they curved past other signage directing me to other places. What an ordeal.