Head To This Website To See How Infuriatingly Long Your TSA Wait Will Be

By now, you've probably heard airports across the country descended into a chaotic mess over the weekend, leaving exhausted passengers stuck waiting in hours-long security lines, praying they'd eventually make their flights. The delays were initially caused by an increase in TSA workers calling out after Republicans refused to negotiate on the DHS shutdown that, among other things, now means everyone at TSA is currently working for free. Throw in a fatal crash at LaGuardia on Sunday night, and this week isn't looking great for speedy, convenient air travel. If you're supposed to fly this week, should you even bother?

Generally speaking, if you don't have to fly, it's probably best not to, but that doesn't really help business travelers who have to fly no matter what, nor does it help anyone dealing with a family emergency that requires getting to the other side of the country as fast as possible. The good news is, not every airport looks like a scene from a disaster movie. Some are definitely backed up, while others are running just fine, but if your flight isn't for another couple of days, there's no telling which scenario you'll encounter.

To help you out, our friend Zach Griff over at From The Tray Table built a tool that tracks TSA wait times at airports across the country and should hopefully make it a little easier to figure out how much cushion to build into your schedule if you have to fly this week. 

Like all tools, From The Tray Table's airport wait time tracker has its limitations. It can only give you information it has access to, so if an airport has temporarily stopped releasing that information, the tool won't be very helpful. At the time of writing, the wait times for Atlanta, Newark, and LaGuardia are all listed as "paused," while Salt Lake City is listed as "unknown." That said, the vast majority of airports are still reporting their wait times, as well as how many security checkpoints they have open.

For example, the airport with the longest wait at the time of writing is Houston's IAH, which has an estimated wait time of 250 minutes (or more than four hours) and only has two of its nine checkpoints open. If you have to get to Tulsa, you might just want to drive instead, but if you're headed to Maine, best of luck, because you're most likely going to need it. On the other hand, if you're flying out of Houston's HOU, both security checkpoints are reportedly open, and the wait is less than 10 minutes. 

At the time of writing, the tool also shows 11 airports reporting wait times of 15 minutes or less, and the good news is, that list isn't exclusively small, regional airports. In descending order of estimated wait times, MIA, PHX, DFW, HOU, DCA, BWI, MSP, DTW, CLT, LAX, and DEN are all reporting sub-20-minute waits. Of course, in another day or two, everything could flip, and the airports with long waits today could end up being the ones with short waits tomorrow. So don't assume you're good to go just because your airport looks good right now. 

I'll also apologize for using airport codes that most regular travelers don't have memorized and making this post a little less infrequent-traveler-friendly, but with such drastic differences in wait times between airports in even the same city, I wouldn't want someone flying out of HOU to hear there's a long wait at the Houston airport and decide to cancel their flight, even though the real problems are at IAH today. 

Hopefully, you can simply stay home and avoid the mess, but if not, keep an eye on From The Tray Table's TSA wait time tracker. At least as long as your airport doesn't pull an ATL and give up on reporting wait times. That would suck for more reasons than just not knowing how long it'll take to get through security.