Before flying to NYC last week, I tried to find some information on what I could expect at the airports regarding the impact of the new security. Since I couldn’t find anything, I thought I would post these two airports.

Burlington (Thursday Aug 17th, late morning: 5 minutes)

The two ends of BTV are treated like separate terminals and each has their own security checkin. I went through the downstairs one which is for Jet Blue and some of the others, but I can’t remember which ones. My flight was at 11:30 am. I arrived at 9:45 am. I got through security in under 5 minutes.

JFK Jet Blue Terminal 6 (Friday Aug 18th, late night: 5 minutes)

This shocked me. I arrived at about 8:30 and again was through security in 5 minutes. They had 4 lines open and there just weren’t very many people.

Liquids in Carryons – oops

Both times, I inadvertantly had some liquid when going through security. The first was a small bottle of hand lotion in an outside pocket of my back pack. I had emptied out the backpack and repacked it, but had missed this. On the way home, I had totally forgotten about the small, nearly emtpy now, bottle of water I had been carrying around Manhattan on that hot August day with me. Both of these were extracted by the security workers.

I talked with someone who was travelling out west with a friend earlier that week. They had met up with her somewhere in the midwest. She too had a bottle of water. Security stopped her and found and tossed the water. The friend is from Texas and normally carries a Texas sized version of a pocket knife (a hunting knife!). When they arrived at their destination, she realized that her knife was still in her bag. She had forgotten to take it out before going to the airport and didn’t even know it was in there. The security folks were so hell-bent on liquids that they hadn’t found it.