[Attendee] Anyone at ATL? Are flights making it out today(Thursday)

Fri Feb 14 17:53:44 UTC 2014

I forgot to mention…

I asked one of the TSA guys how many passengers they expected to screen this day and he said about 56,000 people. He also mentioned that many of them had been living at the airport since Tuesday.”

My guesstimates were that

20 gates each seem to process about 5 passengers per minute, for about 100 passengers per minute. 
(I took a very small sample : at one gate for a couple minutes, so adjust your numbers as you see fit.)

*60 minutes/hour
*10 peak hours per day 
——————————
would mean that about 60,000 passengers would be able to go through in a full capacity 10 hour period

Of course the load normally would follow a curve based on the flight schedules, but here we had a few days of passenger backup so a 100% full use case seems right.

Bill

PS - Other interesting observation - one guy slid into the last section of the line to offer people $20, $30, and up to swap positions, to go to the end of the line. That value of time calculation would be an interesting one to do - how much is your time worth? If you were early enough, and all you would do otherwise is eat or sit somewhere and read, what is your price?