America’s Worst Airport

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 26, 11:38AM EDT

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America’s Worst Airport — © Zephyr18 / Getty Images

Air travel delays have reached extraordinary levels lately, though this wasn’t always the case in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic grounded the entire industry, prompting federal aid to keep carriers afloat. Thousands of airline workers lost jobs as planes were mothballed for months. Now, as travel rebounds, understaffed and overstretched airlines struggle to keep up, causing cascading disruptions.

Carriers were suddenly allowed to operate again due to vaccination and the decline of infections. The industry was unprepared and had to quickly add tens of thousands of workers and put planes back in service. Air travel returned to pre-pandemic levels, and passenger levels surpassed even those during holidays. The turnaround turned chaotic.
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Recently, huge storms have caused thousands of flights to be canceled, and from time to time, this happened during holidays—the delays for some flights extended to an hour or more.

People’s aversion to certain airports often stems from prolonged wait times at security checkpoints and a higher frequency of flight delays. These factors combined can result in wait times exceeding an hour, from the initiation of the security process to the departure of their flights.

PlanetWare looked at these metrics. It used iFly data to register the average security wait time for more than 200 airports. In addition, it used Bureau of Transportation Statistics data to determine on-time, delayed, canceled, and total flights at more than 300 U.S. airports since 2014. Nationwide, the average wait time across the U.S. was approximately 10 minutes.
On average, of all flights, 81.0% were on time since 2014.
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Daniel K Inouye International in Honolulu had the worst wait time at an average of 20.5 minutes. In a period when flight delays are a regular part of air travel, even that time seems short. Next on the list was one of the world’s largest airports. The average wait time was 19.5 minutes, followed by Chicago’s other airport–Midway–at 18.4 minutes.

Some airports have very low waiting times. At the top of this list is the Baltimore Thurgood Marshall Airport at 5.1 minutes, and the Detroit Wayne County Airport at 7.1 minutes. (These are the world’s best airlines, according to passengers.)

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.