Can’t face another endless line at the airport? Fly off-peak

IT’S 7:20 on a Sunday morning in August. Across Los Angeles, churchgoers shuffle into pews, hipsters sleep off Saturday night’s revelries and freeways flow freely.

But there’s no rest at LAX. Gridlock seizes the roadways around Terminals 6 and 7. Inside, there’s no relief.

“I’ve never seen a line like this,” said John Dodson, stuck behind 100 people waiting for a turn at Continental’s ticket counters. After a five-day vacation, Dodson and his daughter, Morgan, 13, and son, Brice, 12, were scheduled on a 9:20 a.m. flight home to Houston.

On the sidewalk outside, Kay Lang of Marina del Rey waited with 27 other passengers for a chance to hand over $2 to United’s skycaps.

“I can’t believe this,” said the designer, who was booked on a 9:40 a.m. flight to Orlando for a fashion conference the next day.

Believe it.

With air traffic breaking records and summer the most popular travel season, fliers may languish in long lines if they don’t dodge the peak times.

But just try to find out when those peak times are. I contacted several airports and airlines, and most said they don’t keep data on which days and hours terminals see the most passengers.

So, I turned to a useful, although imperfect, guide: wait times at passenger security checkpoints. The Transportation Security Administration posts recent figures, hour by hour, for each U.S. airport at waittime.tsa.dhs.gov.

The list is useful because it tells you the wait you may face. It’s imperfect because it can’t predict future waits, which may be affected by weather, airport construction, holidays and other factors.

And it doesn’t tell you about lines at the ticket counters, which were three times as long as those at the nearest TSA checkpoint when I visited Terminal 6 on a recent Sunday morning.

How does the TSA figure wait times? It’s simple. At the top or bottom of the hour, said TSA spokesman Nico Melendez, a supervisor clicks a card in a time-stamp machine at the checkpoint, then passes it to a passenger at the end of the line. When the passenger arrives at the checkpoint, the card gets time-stamped again.

The TSA website posts the average and maximum waits, by hour and day of the week, for each airport terminal over the last month.

I looked at the numbers collected July 20 through Aug. 17 for four heavily traveled airports: LAX, McCarran in Las Vegas, O’Hare in Chicago and John F. Kennedy in New York.

Based on the longest average wait at any terminal’s checkpoint, all four airports had longer lines in the morning, peaking between 5 and 11 a.m. depending on the airport and day of the week. After noon the longest waits were 8 p.m. to midnight at LAX, noon to 2 p.m. at McCarran and 4 to 6 p.m. at O’Hare and JFK.

All four airports tended to post their longest waits on Mondays, Fridays and Sundays. The shortest waits were on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thursdays and Saturdays were wild cards -- slow at some, busy at others.

Spokespeople at Continental, Southwest and United said that overall, they move fewer passengers on Tuesdays and Wednesdays than on other days of the week, although all three said Saturdays were also slow.

The lesson: Fly midweek and, except for McCarran, at midday to minimize your wait at checkpoints.

Each airport had its oddities:

* LAX: The evening rush hour for security lines wasn’t at 5 p.m., as might be expected, but several hours later.

“It’s a lot of red-eyes,” explained Jeff Green, spokesman for United, the airport’s biggest carrier. United’s late-night flights depart for Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and other points east.

Terminal 6, which United shares with Continental and other carriers, posted the airport’s longest average nighttime wait: 19 minutes between 11 p.m. and midnight on Fridays.

Tom Bradley International Terminal also had long lines after 9 p.m., with flights headed to Asia and other destinations. LAX, which expects to clear 64 million passengers this year, gets 28% of its business from foreign flights, spokeswoman Nancy Suey Castles said.

The shortest wait times at LAX were on Saturdays.

* McCarran: A tip for Sin City fliers: never on Sunday, if you hate lines. It was then that McCarran passengers endured the week’s longest average waits in security: 21 minutes between 10 and 11 a.m. at the Terminal 1 checkpoint for the A and B gates (America West) and 20 minutes between 1 and 2 p.m. at the Terminal 1 checkpoint for the C gates (Southwest).

“Las Vegas is the quintessential weekend getaway,” Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said. And many of those visitors need to be back to work on Monday.

Wait times were spread fairly evenly over the other days of the week. They reached peaks in the morning and midday.

* O’Hare: Two checkpoints dominated the TSA’s list of long lines: 6 and 7 at Terminal 3, which is mainly used by American Airlines. The peak average was 22 minutes from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursday.

More than 15 of American’s international departures leave after 4 p.m., said airline spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan, and crowds booked on jumbo jets and the elaborate check-in required for such flights contributed to delays. Another factor was ongoing construction.

Saturdays logged the longest morning average: 18 minutes between 7 and 8 a.m. Fagan said seasonal flights to Mexico and fliers making connections to cruises keep flights busy then.

* JFK: Expect long lines on weekends. The peak average morning wait was 22 minutes between 8 and 9 a.m. Sundays at Terminal 2. The peak evening wait was 19 minutes between 4 and 5 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays at Terminal 3. JFK, LaGuardia and the Newark airports together expect to process a record 100 million passengers this year, said Pasquale Difulco, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

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Hear more tips from Jane Engle on Travel Insider topics at latimes.com/engle. Write to Travel Insider, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.