A Day of Clear Skies

It’s almost uncomfortable to say, for fear of sounding unsympathetic or unpatriotic, but in some ways business travel has been easier since Sept. 11 for advertising executive Laird Stiefvater.

“Frankly, it’s a little more predictable,” he says as he starts out a Monday morning on the way to New York’s LaGuardia Airport for a flight to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport for a business meeting in Virginia.

“Before, the flights out of LaGuardia were just jammed; they were stacked up one after another after another. You could leave the gate at 8 a.m. and then not take off until 9:10.

“But now,” says the Manhattan father of two, “there’s just not as much congestion.”

For Stiefvater, 41, a senior vice president with Foote, Cone & Belding, it means he can set the alarm clock for as late as 7 a.m.--even when he has a 10 a.m. meeting with marketing executives for the U.S. Postal Service in Rosslyn, Va.

At 7:30 a.m., a driver picks up Stiefvater from his West Side apartment and whisks him across town, up FDR Drive, over the Triboro Bridge and into the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport. The trip takes about 20 minutes.

The LaGuardia-to-National run is a trip Stiefvater has done at least once a week for the better part of a decade. The Delta Air Lines shuttle operates out of a terminal separate from the main airport, with its own parking facility, and is a favorite among travelers in the Boston-New York-Washington corridor.

“There’s good people watching on this flight,” Stiefvater says. “I’ve seen Bill Bradley, Charles Schumer, Bianca Jagger and Joe Lieberman. Al Sharpton travels with an entourage like a boxer.”

It’s 38 degrees out with a biting wind, but Stiefvater wears only his suit jacket as he steps out of the car and strides into the terminal.

Five Delta agents are rapidly processing passengers for shuttle flights to Boston or the nation’s capital. Stiefvater steps up to an agent and hands over the voucher from his travel agency and his driver’s license. He has his boarding pass within one minute. Walking 20 feet to security, he slips his briefcase onto the conveyor belt, walks through the stand-up metal detector and grabs the case again without incident.

This time it was easy. About a week after Sept. 11, Stiefvater arrived at LaGuardia for a business trip. Inside his carry-on, left there after a family vacation, was a tiny screwdriver--part of the assembly kit for a toy he bought his son.

“My bag beeped, so then they took me aside and I got the wand-and-shoe search,” he recalls. And LaGuardia security got itself an extra screwdriver.

Today he is at the gate by 8a.m., precisely when the 8:30 a.m. flight begins boarding.

Once on board, Stiefvater stores his suit jacket in an overhead compartment and takes a window seat in the plane’s last row.

Stiefvater has two rules for his trips: Never check baggage, and sit as far to the rear of the plane as possible. Most Delta shuttle fights to Washington allow passengers to “deplane” through a jet way at the front of the aircraft or down stairs at the back. By leaving from the back of the plane, Stiefvater can make a beeline for the airport’s attached Metro station.

At 8:32 a.m., the plane taxis away from the gate. By 8:49 a.m., Stiefvater is airborne.

“It really is a better climate for business travel than it used to be,” he says.

Reagan National remained closed until Oct. 4, making it the last major U.S. airport to reopen after the terrorist attacks. For three weeks, Stiefvater commuted to Washington by train. Stiefvater was back on the shuttle the day Reagan National reopened.

“There were only a few of us on the plane that morning,” he recalls. “There was a lot of camaraderie and chitchat. Stewardesses thanking us, us thanking them.... When we landed, National was so empty that all you could hear was the sound of the guards’ boots.”

This day, there are 88 passengers on Flight 1745, which makes the plane more than half full. A flight attendant says the number of business passengers flying again has “crept up, week by week.”

Each time Stiefvater has traveled since September, he has become a little savvier about his routine. After the screwdriver incident, he now makes sure he knows that what’s in his case is not on the confiscation list. Attention to such details shaves minutes off a commute. “You learn what makes you beep,” he says.

But what is most telling about the way Stiefvater travels now may be the things he does not do differently, such as changing the time he arrives at the airport.

“If you’re going to check in two hours early for a flight to Washington, you might as well take the train,” he says. These days, he leaves “maybe 10 minutes earlier.”

Flight 1745 begins its descent into Washington about 9:25 a.m., and the wounded Pentagon comes into view. The wheels scrape the runway at 9:35 a.m.--two minutes ahead of schedule--and the plane taxis swiftly to the gate.

Stiefvater is the first passenger out the back when flight attendants open the door. He leads a few other passengers across the tarmac and into the terminal, and by 9:50a.m. he is at the airport’s Metro station, awaiting a Blue Line train for the ride to Rosslyn.

The Postal Service marketing department is just across the street from the Rosslyn Metro stop. At 10:02 a.m., Stiefvater bounds up the escalator, crosses the street and walks through the office doors, his morning commute behind him.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

New York to Washington

Laird Stiefvater

Age: 41

Title: Ad agency executive

Years on the road: 17

Annual trips pre-9/11: 60 to 70

Annual trips post-9/11: No change

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Airport Report Card

Best

New York’s LaGuardia: “The Delta shuttle operates like a machine.”

Ronald Reagan Washington National: “National has terrific shops and good food. If I forget Valentine’s Day or a birthday, there’s always something there I can pick up. It runs very smoothly.... The senators make that possible.”

Worst

Chicago’s O’Hare: “It’s a beautiful airport, but it takes forever to get there in traffic from downtown, and flights are always delayed.”