A Dramatically Different Way to Travel

At Dulles, where one of the hijacked Sept. 11 flights took off, a new $1.5 billion United Airlines concourse and its underground train connection -- prime pieces of a $4.1 billion building project that was to be a highlight of Wilding's 40-year career -- are on indefinite hold. Wilding spends much of his time trying to solve a new problem: where to put about 22 more explosives-detection machines, each the size of a minivan, at Dulles and National without crowding out passengers.

He also grapples with a powerful but frustrating new tenant at his airports: the Transportation Security Administration. He said he lost patience as months passed and the TSA couldn't answer any of his questions about how airlines at Dulles and National would be able to screen all luggage by the Dec. 31 deadline set by Congress.

"They'd just say, 'We don't have anything to say to you yet,' " Wilding said. "They said, 'We're going to rely on these contractors to do it,' and we said, 'When are they going to show up? Have you all looked at a calendar lately?' "

By June, 10 months after the attacks, Wilding still hadn't had a "substantive conversation" with anyone from the TSA about how they were going to get the massive machines in place in time.

The TSA wants to put them in the lobby of Dulles's already tight terminal. That could be done relatively quickly, Wilding said, but the machines would consume about half of the already limited queuing space at ticket counters. Wilding and the airlines want to take more time and put the machines downstairs, out of sight and out of the way.

John W. Magaw, the former TSA chief whom airports and lawmakers had complained about being unresponsive, has been replaced by James M. Loy, who is making the rounds of airports that must implement his changes. Wilding said he is optimistic that he and the TSA "are on the same side of the line" now that the government finally views airports as partners.

Airports, Wilding said, "should be places where people feel at home and not like some machine is going to gobble them up."

The Passenger

Business traveler Yates flies so often, he knows that the first row of A and B seats in first class of a United Airlines Airbus A320 has six more inches of legroom than the C and D seats. Airline employees at United's Red Carpet Club at BWI know him by name.

As a marketing director for Northrop Grumman Corp. in Linthicum, he leaves BWI every Monday afternoon, bound for Los Angeles. Every Friday morning, he flies back.

He used to think of flying every week as merely an unusually long commute. After working a full day, he could breeze into BWI 30 minutes before departure and use the five-hour flight to relax with a paperback, catch up on work or take a nap. But since flights resumed after Sept. 11, Yates said, the trip only seems long, complicated and chaotic.

"Let's see what the lines look like," Yates sighed recently, as he stepped off the parking-lot shuttle van and entered the BWI terminal, his eyes immediately darting to the United security checkpoint at Pier A.

The line was unusually short -- almost nonexistent -- and he sailed through in a couple of minutes. It was nothing like last fall, when lines snaked through BWI as far as the eye could see, rifle-toting National Guard troops patrolled the terminal, and passengers waited so long to clear security that some missed their flights.

While Yates welcomed the lack of lines, it underscored one of his greatest annoyances with flying in the past year: He never knows whether he will have to wait at a security checkpoint for 60 seconds or 60 minutes.

Because he has to incorporate two extra hours for unpredictable lines, the five-hour trip he never minded before now stretches into eight hours, amounting to another entire work day. Now, he said, he minds.