The busiest travel day of the year - also known as the Sunday after Thanksgiving - passed yesterday with few glitches or gripes across the Baltimore region, even as the number of airline passengers sharply spiked and the train, bus and car crowds turned out in force.
At Baltimore-Washington International Airport, air travel was up 12 percent from last year, when safety concerns after the Sept. 11 terror attacks reduced Thanksgiving traffic at the airport by about 6 percent. Airport officials expected 648,000 passengers from Nov. 22 through today, with 77,000 travelers yesterday alone, said BWI spokeswoman Tracy Newman.
Passengers braced for the worst, but instead found a system running smoothly.
"It's been crowded. There are a lot of people, but I think they go into it with the mind-set that they know it's going to be bad, and they're just going to be patient," said Cindy Graham of Rockville, who was returning to BWI yesterday from Florida with her husband, Scott Graham, and their two children: 5-year-old Katherine and 3-year-old Thomas.
The Grahams were prepared to face long lines and harrowing security checkpoints, but Cindy Graham said they cleared airports on both ends of their trip with few delays.
"I was very surprised," she said. "You're going out on the heaviest [travel] day of the year with two little kids, you just don't want to leave anybody behind."
BWI's Newman said there were no major delays at the airport, and the average passenger passed through the security screening checkpoints in about six minutes during the weekend, about half the 10 to 15 minutes they are told to expect on normal travel days.
Across the country, airlines expected about 5 million people to fly during the weekend, an increase of about 6 percent from last year, according to the American Automobile Association.
The crush of holiday travelers was expected to be the first major test of new federal security screeners, who have been on the job less than a month at some airports.
In May, BWI was the first airport in the country to have all of its security workers in place, providing the new screeners a comfortable head start, Newman said.
"Of course, since last year, the screeners have had so much training - they know what to look for, what not to look for," Newman said yesterday.
"The lines were just handled so smoothly; you wouldn't know it was a travel day unlike any other," he said.
There was only a slight increase in ground travel from last year, and clear, sunny skies in the region made for relatively smooth journeys.
Car travel increased about 1 percent, with nearly 31 million people across the country - including 616,000 Marylanders - using that mode, according to AAA figures.
Those drivers contributed to heavy congestion along Maryland's main highways yesterday, but state police reported no serious accidents or traffic tie-ups.
Amtrak saw about 545,000 travelers over the Thanksgiving holiday, a slight increase from last year. Officials with the Greyhound bus line said they expected about the same number of travelers as last year.
Riders on a Greyhound bus traveling from Philadelphia to New York on Saturday night had one of the most memorable holiday trips when the driver, apparently annoyed by passengers complaining about his route, said he was taking them all "to the Taliban."
The bus was quickly surrounded by police cars in New Jersey after nervous riders used cell phones to call authorities.
Mary Kathryn Mollohan of Washington, D.C., felt the pinch of the resurgence in air travel. The 14-year-old ninth-grader had to fly standby from boarding school in Massachusetts to spend Thanksgiving with her family.
"We also tried to get a train ticket, and that didn't work, either," Mary Kathryn said yesterday as she and her mother, Barbara Mollohan, navigated what they described as a surprisingly calm BWI.
Barbara Mollohan said the scene was far worse outside the airport Wednesday night, when a mass of drivers arrived to pick up their Thanksgiving visitors.
"It was very bad. I had to circle three times," she said.