Spending the night in an Atlanta airport TSA line

Instead, he ended up in something of a nightmare: waiting in an inching Transportation Security Administration line for nine hours overnight.

“I never could have imagined that from the time we started the line at 6:20 in the evening Sunday that it would be 3:20 a.m. Monday morning before we crossed through the TSA security checkpoint,” Frampton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“I mean, how can you possibly even fathom that that would happen?”

Frampton’s is one of many tales of travel woe that the ongoing Department of Homeland Security funding lapse has created across airports in the U.S. as the pressure of missed paychecks takes its toll on Transportation Security Administration officers.

They and other DHS employees including Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Coast Guard have been working without pay for more than five weeks.

Many TSA officers have been forced to call out sick in order to feed their families in other ways, DHS officials say. More than 41% of Atlanta’s officers called out on Sunday; security lines Monday morning began outside the domestic terminal’s doors.

George Borek, an American Federation of Government Employees union steward representing Atlanta TSA employees, told the AJC Monday that officers are “holding up like a Band-Aid.” Even if lines lessen for a few hours here or there, the situation remains fraught.

“It’s like a balloon,” he said. “You keep filling it, and eventually it gets to a point where it can’t hold anything else. It’s going to pop.”

Sunday at Atlanta, Borek said, was the worst he’d ever seen. “I’ve never seen it that way.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

‘Enough is enough’

When Frampton arrived at the airport on Sunday evening, the line started near the oversized baggage claim area and snaked slowly through the terminal.

“It was a maze of going around the baggage carousels,” he said.

He had been back in his hometown for an annual high school reunion fantasy baseball draft over the weekend.

Now based out of Omaha with his family, Frampton started a video production company, McLeod Media, after a career in broadcast journalism across the country — including at one point for Atlanta’s CBS46.

Pretty soon on Sunday, Frampton said he and his fellow travelers realized they were not going to make their evening flights, but decided to stick it out for the morning.

“I was talking to people like, listen, one of the hardest things to do in America right now is to get through TSA,” he said. “If we need to sleep on the floor and the terminal, so be it.”

He was able to call Delta Air Lines customer service and rebook himself for that Monday 9 a.m. easily.

After confirming he would have a seat in the morning, he resigned himself to the situation and became more “Zen,” he said.

“Come what may, this is happening. This is going to be what it is, and I will get through and I will get home tomorrow,” he said.

TSA officers ultimately consolidated the security checkpoint lines into one, as normally happens overnight. Airport staff and police officers were helping manage passengers, too.

But what really was difficult was that the line moved just enough that no one had a chance to sit and rest or close their eyes, he said.

“It was kind of layered torture in a way,” Frampton said. He said he was only able to sit and close his eyes for maybe 10 minutes at one point.

He did, however, befriend his fellow travelers around him in line.

They saved each other’s places and held bags to take turns going to the bathroom or buying a drink or a snack.

And the woman staffing the Shellis News in the domestic atrium, he said, kindly stayed open hours past her shift to keep serving these stranded travelers. “Hats off, many thanks and gratitude” for her, he said.

A staffer at that Shellis on Monday morning confirmed to the AJC that this Sunday night employee did not go home until 4 a.m., even though the store generally closes at 11 p.m. (An effort to confirm this with the store’s general manager was unsuccessful by deadline.)

When he finally made it through, Frampton beelined for first Delta Sky Club to open in the T Concourse. He waited outside the doors with a few dozen others until 4:30 a.m.

Credit: Ben Hendren

Credit: Ben Hendren

“Boy, we were glad to get in there and get our own space and get some food and just sit in a comfortable chair,” he said. At one point he was surrounded by people just sleeping in their chairs.

Frampton said he doesn’t assign blame to one political party or the other for the shutdown over a dispute regarding immigration enforcement operations.

But he did something he’s never done before last week, when he saw the first videos of long security lines. “I wrote and called both my senators here in Nebraska and said ‘Enough is enough. Figure something out.’” he told the AJC after his flight.

“The system is just collapsing, and we can see it happening,” he said.

“And in a way, it represents the breakdown of our ability to communicate and compromise. It’s sad. And I just hope we turn a corner soon.”

— Staff writers Ernie Suggs and Brooke Howard contributed reporting.