AviationGeeks.com - How early is too early?

AN AIRPORT is a great place to write a blog post. If you're on a long layover or have a long wait for your flight, there's a lot of dead time that can be used to get work done. So that's what Gulliver is doing now. Why do I have so much time? I arrived at the airport way too early. Even the full-body scanners and other enhanced security measures here in Washington don't change the fact that Saturday is a slow travel day. Two hours early for a domestic flight is way, way too much if you're travelling on Saturday. It's probably too much even if you're leaving from LaGaurdia, O'Hare, or some other nightmare airport and planning to check bags—even then, there's a good chance you'll be waiting a while to board.

Still, many Americans are determined to stick to the two-hour rule. "So much could go wrong," the argument goes. But many, if not most, of the time, nothing does go wrong. It only took me 20 minutes or so to get my boarding pass and get through security today—and that includes 10 minutes walking from one side of the terminal to the other. I already make a habit of trying to fly out of Reagan/National Airport (DCA) to save time (the area's other two airports, Dulles and BWI, are much farther from the center of the city). So why waste so much time sitting in the airport?

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