Nation’s Airports Become Hubs of Inactivity

At 5:09 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, you could have fired a cannon down Terminal B at Dulles International Airport and not hit a soul. The woman at the concourse Starbucks counter was so bored she had cleaned the espresso machine and changed all the gaskets two weeks ahead of schedule. One airport parking attendant at a booth in a nearly deserted lot called her manager to ask if she could go home.

It was supposed to have been the day that air traffic stood still. It wasn’t. It was the night air traffic stood still. All the scary prophesies of computers going haywire and planes falling from the sky did not deter the flying public for much of Friday. But by the time the sun went down, airports around the nation were reduced to cavernous tombs.

Fear of the unknown had helped do what war, terrorism, storms and labor discord had never managed: all but shut down the American commercial aviation system, if even for a few hours.

“It’s spooky, really spooky,” said Sharon Dumelle, a ground transportation supervisor at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, her radio crackling as she summoned a cab in the subfreezing cold. “I have never seen it this quiet in 20 years.”

United and American airlines canceled a third of their flights while Delta scratched about a quarter, all for lack of business. Smaller carriers, such as Frontier Airlines, Virgin Atlantic Airways and Southwest Airlines, shut down entirely. Only one American flight was scheduled to be in the air when 2000 dawned, with Federal Aviation Administrator Jane Garvey on board in a bravura show of confidence that the skies were as safe as ever.

The Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport was among the least popular places to be in Los Angeles, with 85% of the flights canceled and the corridors all but vacant. Only three departures were scheduled between 9 p.m. and midnight.

For days, airline industry polls have insisted it was not fear keeping travelers on the ground but convenience--a desire to be celebrating when the millennium dawned, not folded up in coach with no leg room, somewhere over Kansas City.

But most people apparently decided to get wherever they were going well before the fateful hour. Apparently Americans don’t scare as easily as they used to--they fly anyway--but common sense said why tempt the fates on a night that comes once every thousand years?

“I wanted them back home before midnight. I wasn’t going to take any chances,” said Michele Juhlke at Dulles, as she retrieved her daughters Caitlin, 11, and Courtney, 14, from a flight just in from Canada. They were going straight home to suburban Virginia to greet midnight safely immersed in the family hot tub.

Flying the Empty Skies

Some people would have preferred the dentist chair to a seat on an airplane on such an ominous day. Airlines that months ago hiked fares in anticipation of millennial profits were left with pathetically populated jumbo jets. A lot of people just decided to stay home; flights were canceled by the dozens.

The last United flight to leave Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport for Miami at 8 p.m. had precisely six passengers on board--half of them the Douglas family of Maryland.

“I didn’t make these plans, my husband did. I ‘d rather be at home on a night like this,” Linda Douglas said as her 2-year-old daughter, Sabrina Louise, buzzed joyfully around the deserted floors of terminals B and C, a man in a plastic top hat the only traveler within annoyance range. Her parents had just been upgraded to first class, and by all indications she would soon have the run of the airplane.

In many ways, Friday might have been the best set of traveling conditions in airline history. By late afternoon at several airports, there were no lines anywhere--not at the car rental counters, not at the information desk, not at the bars. Empty shuttles circled forlornly in the dark.

Colette Ginthner of Manassas, Va., got a last-minute urge to fly from Dulles to Las Vegas for a family reunion and on one day’s notice booked a $455.01 fare, one-third the regular price. There were 19 people on the return flight, which featured free cocktails and a free movie.

At the Qantas ticket counter in the Tom Bradley terminal, 10 ticket agents wearing party hats waited on Lazaro Dominguez, 54, and Olivia Gonzalez, 48, Mexican ministers on their way to a Baptist convention in Sydney, Australia.

“We are not the least bit afraid because God will be with us all the way,” Gonzalez said. Not to mention an army of flight attendants ready to serve 40 passengers on a plane equipped to hold 385.

While it lasted, it was one big party in the sky. Attendants on a flight originating in Portland, Ore., may have set some kind of service record: They offered a beverage, breakfast, another beverage, cocktail snacks, lunch, a champagne toast, ceremonial punch for the kids and two free movies.

The pilot made a rousing Happy New Year speech that choked some people up, and several passengers posed for a group ‘hug.

“If you gotta work, you might as well make the best of it,” one flight attendant said; she declined to name the airline, fearing corporate retribution for excessive freebies.

As Day Wanes, the Crowds Thin

But as the day wore on, the flow of brave revelers stemmed to a trickle. Shops closed three hours early. Before the rest of the nation had even begun the party, airport staffs were marking time.

Two Delta pilots browsed in a golf store before boarding a Boston shuttle at Washington National they were certain would have no passengers. They were mostly flying so the plane would be at Logan International Airport for takeoff today. Even so, they would make the mandatory welcome-aboard speech, and announce the arrival time and altitude to a bunch of empty rows.

If there was one thing to look forward to in this new millennium, it was an end to its long-anticipated arrival. No more anxious predictions. No more hype. No more pressure to do something memorable. No more awaiting technological doom.

All in all, aviation-wise, the Big Scare was shaping up to be a Big Fizz.

Thank heavens.

For Hubert Carter, an aviation custodian at Chicago’s O’Hare, it was just another New Year’s Eve. “There’s nothing to clean up,” he said, stuffing the farewell 1999 Chicago Sun-Times into a trash bin.

Times staff writer Louis Sahagun in Los Angeles, and researchers John B. Beckham in Chicago and Belen Rodriguez in Denver contributed to this story.