The morning of Monday, March 28 was a swirling nightmare of congestion at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Passengers complained of security lines stretching outside the Barbara Jordan Terminal. Folks heading home from F1 or Dell Match Play or a frolic in the Austin sun abandoned rental cars by the side of the road and hoofed it toward security. And that was before the airport issued a fuel shortage alert.
And it doesn’t even crack the top-10 busiest days in ABIA history. With 28,676 passengers served — 26,000-plus is what the airport considers its threshold for “busy” — it’s not even in the top-five busiest days in March 2022. And airport staff are still trying to figure out exactly how the airport became a clustered mess, causing missed flights and irate passengers.
“It’s serious anytime we see that long of a delay and that kind of impact to operation, but it is a little atypical,”ABIA acting public information officer and marketing manager Sam Haynes says.
The airport noted that 8,252 passengers were checked in before 8 a.m. that morning, but that number is lower than the almost 9,000 checked in the previous morning. Haynes says that the chaos may have began when a rental vehicle stalled out on the curbside. The rental car staff then told the customer to leave the keys in the car to make their flight.
“And then other passengers and customers saw that and followed suit,” Haynes says. “It led to this domino effect…
The morning of Monday, March 28 was a swirling nightmare of congestion at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Passengers complained of security lines stretching outside the Barbara Jordan Terminal. Folks heading home from F1 or Dell Match Play or a frolic in the Austin sun abandoned rental cars by the side of the road and hoofed it toward security. And that was before the airport issued a fuel shortage alert.
And it doesn’t even crack the top-10 busiest days in ABIA history. With 28,676 passengers served — 26,000-plus is what the airport considers its threshold for “busy” — it’s not even in the top-five busiest days in March 2022. And airport staff are still trying to figure out exactly how the airport became a clustered mess, causing missed flights and irate passengers.
“It’s serious anytime we see that long of a delay and that kind of impact to operation, but it is a little atypical,”ABIA acting public information officer and marketing manager Sam Haynes says.
The airport noted that 8,252 passengers were checked in before 8 a.m. that morning, but that number is lower than the almost 9,000 checked in the previous morning. Haynes says that the chaos may have began when a rental vehicle stalled out on the curbside. The rental car staff then told the customer to leave the keys in the car to make their flight.
“And then other passengers and customers saw that and followed suit,” Haynes says. “It led to this domino effect…Read Morelocal_news
