At Airports, Travelers Turn Waiting Game Into an Art Form

When she arrived at LAX at 9:30 a.m., Kimberly Ina set out in search. In the art of airport waiting--as in real estate and trout fishing--finding the right spot is crucial.

With almost six hours to kill, Ina surveyed seating areas near the gates, which tend to get crowded and noisy, and she settled on a relatively quiet corridor in the United Airlines terminal, where she could sit in solitude and watch the sun emerge through haze as planes taxied in and out. “It just felt right,” she said.

Traveling by air requires waiting even under ideal conditions. With cancellations and delays compounded this summer by bad weather, air traffic congestion and a labor dispute at United, frustration has mounted.

It’s likely to be a record summer in terms of delays, said David Fuscus, a spokesman for the Air Transport Assn., an industry trade organization. In June, a record 50,114 delays of 15 minutes or more were recorded by the Federal Aviation Administration, Fuscus said--a 20.5% increase over 1999 and a 99.9% increase over 1997.

Meanwhile, waiting is increasingly becoming an art form.

As the heavily traveled Labor Day weekend begins, passengers are advised to arrive early. Then they wait. And wait. And wait.

For some, waiting is tortuous, particularly when caused by unscheduled delays or cancellations. Recourse involves growling at customer service agents, threatening legal action, vowing never to fly on the airline again, then beating one’s head against the nearest wall. Patience, says Ina, works best for her.

“I’m really a patient person. If there’s a problem with a flight, it’s one of those things that I feel there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. Getting stressed about it is just a lot of wasted energy.”

Ina, 36, arrived last Friday from San Francisco, where she is executive director of Sports for the World’s Children, a nonprofit agency providing sports equipment and facilities for schools and youth organizations.

She was waiting for a friend who was due to arrive home in Los Angeles by midafternoon from a business trip in Washington, D.C. Ina used a flight coupon on Alaska Airlines. Sitting alone next to her sandals and the crumpled wrappings of a Big Mac and fries, she tapped away at a laptop computer as she listened to Mexican music through headphones.

Waiting requires food and batteries.

The music, she said, reminded her of children she met in Mexico while distributing sports equipment. Airport waiting, when compared with concerns of the less fortunate, is a minor inconvenience, she said.

Location also is important to Rich and Kim Hurst of Monument, Colo. They stashed their luggage in a locker at Terminal 3 then walked next door to the Tom Bradley International Terminal, where the smell of food from Orient Express, Sushi Boy, Euro Coffee, El Paseo (“A Taste of Mexico”)--and, of course, McDonald’s--mingles with the sounds of many languages.

International waiting is more interesting than domestic waiting, the Hursts maintained, even when traveling from Colorado Springs to Seattle.

The Hursts enjoy layovers so much, they build their travel plans around them. The scheduled wait Friday was three hours. Seated at a bar, Kim was conversing with her sister, who had driven up from Long Beach to meet them.

“When I can, I schedule long layovers so I can get visits in,” said Kim. “Whenever I’m scheduled to stay two hours or more, I call somebody and keep calling until I find somebody that’s going to meet me--provided I have friends or relatives in that town.”

On their return trip, they have scheduled a four-hour layover at LAX so they can have lunch with Kim’s father and stepmother at a nearby Sizzler restaurant.

Kim, 40, is a Spanish teacher and freelance writer-editor for a Christian magazine. Rich, 48, a senior manager for Cook Communications International, a Christian publisher, also travels as a motivational speaker.

“The airport becomes part of your culture, part of your life,” Rich said. “I spend the equivalent of three months out of the year in airports. I don’t get sick of it; it’s just part of my life, part of getting up and going to work.”

He has learned that if you have a long wait, you can ask for a pillow and blankets in certain terminals. He knows he can get a nice shoulder massage at Denver International Airport, where the pretzels are always fresh and hot.

When Kim travels out of Denver, she allows time to get her shoes shined. “It’s cheap, they’re good and right where I need them to be,” she said.

Rich travels with a laptop computer, Palm Pilot and cellular phone. Earlier in the day, he conducted a 30-minute business call while Kim and her sister were eating pizza. Before such technology, he said, it was more difficult to perform work on the road. Traveling, however, was much more peaceful.

Creatively Whiling Away the Hours

Then, there is sleeping. What is obvious at an airport is that the human body is capable of resting in nearly any position. In waiting areas, heads dangle at every angle. For those who prefer the comfort of floors, the makeshift pillows of choice are backpacks, duffel bags and laps.

A woman slumped forward from her seat, resting her head on luggage, awakened with lines indented on her cheek. She is able to rest, she said, despite the steady stream of people, the clatter of luggage wheels against floor surfaces and the constant announcements over the public address system.

She cannot, however, discuss the art of waiting, she said, because she is a federal mediator and is not allowed to discuss with a reporter such potentially delicate issues, which leads to another possibility when killing time in airports.

You can pretend you’re pretty much anyone because chances are you’re never going to see the stranger next to you again. Using one’s imagination becomes sport.

Two couples sitting next to each other were killing time by devising stories they might tell people who asked them about the newly adopted babies they were taking home from an orphanage in China.

Jack and Maureen Kulaga were sitting with newly adopted daughter Kiera, who, for a long-awaited moment, was asleep. Sitting next to them were Matt and Lisa Witkowski of Allentown, Pa. Their new daughter, Jasmine, slept on Matt’s chest as he sipped coffee.

“I said we could tell them that the girls are twins, and their parents were killed in a crash, and we were family members who had come to get the girls and we hated each other so we each were going to take one of the twins and split them apart,” Matt said.

The two couples arrived from Hong Kong with nine other families at 11:20 a.m. and were less than an hour away from their connecting 2:20 p.m. flight to Newark.

For the Witkowskis, both 33 years old, the three-hour wait was blissful. Matt, his eyes red from being awake the last 35 hours, was content to have his daughter asleep on his chest as he sipped the first good cup of coffee he’s had in 17 days.

He and Lisa started talking about adoption two years ago while undergoing treatment for in-ertility. There is no art to that kind of wait. “You don’t know from one day to the next where you stand,” Matt said.

Finally, with a 14-month-old baby in their arms, they know where they stand. The real wait is over. They are going home a family. Three hours in LAX are nothing.

‘Find Something

You Love to Do’

If working, eating, sleeping, listening to music, reading, visiting, and lying weren’t enough to pass the time, Justin Pierce of Holt, Mich., had a few other tricks up his sleeve.

Justin, 15, traveled with 85 other youths doing evangelical work in Australia for two weeks, long enough to have demonstrated his magic repertoire to the rest of the group--most of whom were jet-lagged and sacked out on the floor.

He pulled out a couple of coins, an English penny and a 50-cent piece, and performed a series of maneuvers in which the money seemed to disappear and reappear from one hand to the next.

He also carried a Hackey Sack to boot around when there was no one to talk to. Fellow traveler Eliza Dalton, 19, of Lansing, Mich., said the key to waiting in airports--as in life--is “to find something you love to do.”

In other words, shop, eat, talk and sleep.

While being with friends can make waiting more interesting, traveling with family is potential disaster. The Henrottes of Belgium, however, seemed to be doing fine huddled around a stack of backpacks used as a card table.

The Henrottes had a two-hour wait before boarding a flight to Chicago, where they would connect with a flight home to Brussels. In the last three weeks, Myriam, Michel and their three children drove from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara to Monterey to San Francisco to Sacramento to Yosemite to King’s Canyon to Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas and Phoenix and back to LAX.

As they awaited their flight, they were playing Briscola, an Italian card game. They also played chess and read to fill in the gaps of their vacation. “Waiting is not a problem for us,” said Michel.

In the same seating area, Helen Wall, 34, of Las Vegas was applying makeup. She flies a lot in her work as product development manager for a candy manufacturer. She said she could not identify the candy manufacturer she worked for, but it became apparent that one of the products melts in your mouth, not in your hands.

Traveling is pure hell on makeup, she said, so she delays the process as long as possible, unconcerned that people may be watching. “You get desensitized to the airport,” she said. “You just don’t care if people see you putting on your makeup. It becomes like your living room.”

And it helps pass the time.

In the outdoor smoking area, it was quiet except for the rapid-fire clicking of lighters. Pvt. Jason Beaulieu said his secret to waiting rested in his hands, which held a folder of 150 CDs ranging from Tupac Shakur to Garth Brooks.

In a pinch, he said, he might pull out one of two copies of a self-realization book distributed by Hare Krishnas, which were given to him at the airport. It was unlikely, he said, that the depth of his boredom would reach that point. He was headed for Hawaii.

Not everyone waiting in airports is traveling. Lenny Constanza, 24, of Long Beach arrived two hours early to greet his cousin who was flying in from Philly.

“I like to get here early because there are a lot of weird-looking people to look at,” he said. Plus, it gives him a chance to catch up on his reading. He holds in his lap the latest edition of Mad magazine.

Art, even in terms of waiting, is in the eyes of the beholder.