PHOENIX — Anticipating the usual lines, delays and anxiety of airline travel, Mary Kaye left her home here on Wednesday four hours before her scheduled flight to Jacksonville, Fla., only to park, check in at the ticket counter and pass through security with more than three hours to spare. She was amazed.
"I thought it was going to be very crowded," said Kaye, 57, a decorator traveling on America West. "I thought parking would be impossible and the lines long. Instead, I found everything was easy. I guess I'm going to catch up on my reading."
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving has always been advertised — and feared — as one the busiest travel days in the United States, perhaps second only to the Sunday after. And it was again this year, with airlines expecting as many as 5 million people to fly, an increase of about 6 percent over last year, according to an AAA survey.
But from Boston to Atlanta to Los Angeles, passengers Wednesday said they found something quite unexpected in their effort to reach friends and family in a distant city: a pleasant experience. Despite peak periods in the morning, midday and later afternoon when waiting times extended to more than just a few minutes, travelers everywhere found, as Kaye did, ample parking, shorter waits and relative ease reaching their gates.
"It's incredible," Jeff Christian, 56, an engineer traveling on Delta from Atlanta to Minneapolis, said at the security checkpoint. "I was expecting backups and long lines on the road coming to the airport, and there was no backup. I was expecting long lines at curbside drop-off, and there were no lines. And I was expecting long lines here, and there's nothing. So far, I haven't seen any lines."
Robert Johnson, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Agency, said reports from 10 major airports indicated that waiting times at security checkpoints rarely exceeded 10 minutes, and even then occurred "only in spurts."
Airline and travel industry experts said the relative airport calm reflected adjustments at all levels of air travel since the tumultuous days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which brought the industry to a standstill for several days before it began running again with long lines, short tempers and armed military personnel standing guard.
Even though airlines are operating about 20 percent fewer flights than a year ago, making many coach cabins seem unusually packed, new and speedier protocols on the ground are making it easier for passengers to reach their seats. They include 44,000 newly hired federal security workers, flight schedules spread over the day rather than bunched at certain periods, larger numbers of ticketing agents, and computer stands that allow passengers to generate their own boarding passes.
The changes also reflect a newly educated traveling public, trained by the airlines to arrive hours before flights to avoid the problems that previously bedeviled the system. In addition, airline agents said, they noticed that more people were flying earlier in the week to beat the usual crush.
"We began seeing larger numbers of people flying last Saturday," said an America West agent here. "It was busier than usual."
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the most anxiety-laden part of a trip for many passengers has been the obstacle course of security checkpoints, with demands to remove shoes, turn on computers and submit to body pat-downs. But security screeners won high marks on Wednesday for efficiency and kindness that contributed to an increased sense of safety and security.
"I've been through security too many times when everyone is talking about their date last night," said Allyn Stewart, a film producer waiting at a checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport. "That doesn't fill you with a lot of confidence in security."
One place the vigilance of screeners paid off was Atlanta, where a passenger was found with a handgun and two clips of ammunition in a carry-on bag. The man, who was arrested, told officials he had forgotten the gun was there, the Transportation Security Agency's Johnson said.
Many passengers said their early arrival was based not so much on protocol changes as on their own anxious experiences of last year, when airports were still adjusting to security changes after the attacks.
Sheelagh Thomson, 36, a mother of two young children from Westchester County, N.Y., said she was flying on Delta from La Guardia Airport to Atlanta on the same flight she took last year when she waited three hours to get through the security checkpoint.
"This year it was five minutes," she said. "It was great."
Linda Dintenfass, 45, arrived at Washington's Reagan National for a flight to Tampa, Fla., with the same expectations of delay. "Everything has gone well," she said. "We didn't wait long at all. I've been traveling since 9/11, and I thought today was going to be terrible."
Not all airports were stress-free. A snowstorm Tuesday night delayed morning flights in Boston, and Los Angeles International had the usual quarter-mile morning lines spilling outside Terminal 1. But even facing 30-minute waits, most passengers held their complaints, with the lines moving quickly.
"They're checking everybody they can," said Sam West, a Southwest passenger on his way to Lubbock, Tex. "You just have to start early."
Danna Sieverson, 37, a claims adjuster from Westminster, Calif., traveling to Hawaii, was not so sanguine. She grew annoyed after security workers, concerned about her snorkel, pulled her luggage from a bomb-detection machine. "I think it was a waste of time," she said, complaining that the new technology should be able to distinguish a snorkel from a gun.
Train and bus travel Wednesday was about as industry officials had expected. Cliff Black, a spokesman for Amtrak, said passenger loads this week would be "about the same as last year, with no rise and no significant decrease." Last year, he said, 554,000 passengers had traveled by train between the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after.
Kim Plaskett, a spokeswoman for Greyhound, said the number of bus passengers would be "about equal to last year and 2000," although she did not provide a number. About the only trend Greyhound officials have spotted this year, she said, was people traveling 450 miles or more.
Nor was there much change expected in car travel. The AAA survey also found that 30.8 million people would take a trip of 50 miles or more from home by motor vehicle, 1 percent more than the 30.6 million of a year ago.
But Sandra Hughes, an AAA vice president for travel, said even the modest gains in airline travel were good for the country and a tribute to an industry racked by problems for more than a year.
"This is definitely a positive sign," she said, although a better one appeared for a while Wednesday inside Terminal 4, the busiest of the three at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, serving America West and Southwest: Lines at Starbucks were longer than those at the two main security checkpoints.