About AirportPace

AirportPace answers two questions before a US domestic flight. When is security busiest at my airport? Which flights on my route land on time?

Every number comes from public federal records. We count, average and rank them. We do not estimate, survey or guess.

AirportPace is an independent site run by one person. It is not affiliated with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the US Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), any airport or any airline.

Where the numbers come from

Security hours: TSA throughput records. TSA publishes the number of people screened at each checkpoint, hour by hour, in weekly files in its FOIA reading room. We use the latest 8 weeks that run back to back.

On-time records: BTS on-time performance data. The largest US airlines report each of their scheduled domestic flights to the Department of Transportation, and BTS publishes the records each month. Flights flown by regional partners are included under the airline that sells them. We use the latest 12 published months. BTS releases each month about two months after it ends, so flight records always run behind the calendar.

Each page shows the dates its numbers cover, at the top and above each table.

How we count

Security boards show people screened, not wait times. A busy hour means many people went through the checkpoint. It does not tell you how long the line was. Lines also depend on how many lanes were open, which TSA does not publish.

• Each square on a board is the average number of people screened in that hour on that weekday, over the 8 weeks.
• Counts include passengers and crew. Employee-only lanes are left out.
• The busiest hours are the ones within 10% of the busiest hour of the day.
• Checkpoints that screen fewer than 100 people a day are left out of the checkpoint list.

On time means less than 15 minutes late. We follow the definition the Department of Transportation uses in its Air Travel Consumer Report.

• A flight landed on time if it arrived less than 15 minutes after its scheduled arrival.
• A flight left on time if it pushed back less than 15 minutes after its scheduled departure.
• Cancelled and diverted flights count as not on time. They stay in the totals, so an airline cannot look better by cancelling.
• Hours are scheduled departure times, in the airport's local time.

Flights are listed under the airline that sells them. A regional flight sold as Delta appears as Delta. This matches what you see when you book. When one flight is sold by several airlines, it is counted once.

Airports go by the code on your ticket. A few airports appear under a different code in TSA files. We merge them under the three-letter code airlines use, so West Palm Beach appears as DJT, its current code.

Routes that stopped flying say so. If a route has no flights in the latest two months of records, its page shows the date of the last flight on record instead of current rankings.

Small numbers are labelled. An airline with fewer than ten flights a day is not ranked against the others. It is listed below the table instead. Pages for routes and airports with few flights carry a note that their shares can swing from month to month. At airports that screen fewer than 100 people a day, a single flight can fill an hour on the board, and the page says so.

The flight list uses recent months. Airlines renumber and reschedule flights, so the list of individual flights on a route uses the last 3 months, and only flights that flew at least 8 times.

How the data is checked

Every update runs checks before anything is published. If a check fails, the site keeps its previous numbers.

• The flight months and the security weeks must each run back to back, with no gaps.
• Each flight month must be complete in size.
• Each day of security counts must add up to between 95% and 102% of the daily total TSA publishes on its own passenger volumes page.

How often it updates

The site updates itself twice a week. Security counts move forward a week each time TSA posts a new file. Flight records move forward a month each time BTS releases one.

What this site cannot tell you

• How long you will wait in line today.
• Whether your flight today will be late. Past on-time rates describe the past twelve months, not tomorrow.
• How PreCheck or CLEAR lanes compare with standard lanes. TSA counts most checkpoints as one total, so the lanes cannot be told apart.

For today's conditions, check your airline's app and your airport's website.

Found an error?

If a number looks wrong, write to hello@airportpace.com. Tell us the page and what you expected to see.