Aug. 5--Columbia Regional Airport got some free publicity out of the blue last month in the nation's largest newspaper, but it was the kind that makes airport officials see red.
A USA Today article on July 14 titled "Checkpoint or choke point?" said the airport was one of three with "security lines exceeding 20 minutes more frequently than any other airport."
The article was based on data collected by the Transportation Security Administration between June 2004 and mid-May, but the reference to the Columbia airport might confirm British politician Benjamin Disraeli's famous quote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
"There's problems with the reporting on national wait times," said Lara Uselding, spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration.
The problem is that the numbers don't distinguish between processing procedures at the nation's largest airports and smaller regional airports such as Columbia, she said.
"Because of the nature of security screening, it's difficult to lump all the data together" for comparison, Uselding said.
The larger airports have multiple security personnel and screening stations that operate throughout the flight day, not just when one flight is ready to board, as is the case in Columbia. The other problem with summarizing the data is that wait-time averages vary widely by time of day and even by concourse.
For example, a data table in the article showed St. Louis, the nation's 28th-largest airport, with an overall average of 2.8 minutes to go through security.
Columbia Regional Airport advisory board members talked about the issue before yesterday's monthly board meeting. It's another bump in the road for Manager Bill Boston and the advisory board as they try to reverse a decade-long slide in passenger traffic and improve public perception about the airport.
Boston, who plans to retire Oct. 14, was befuddled after he read the article. "My first reaction was, 'Something is the matter here,'" he said.
Boston said it was obvious that the data or the conclusions were "askew" when Columbia, Florence, Colo., and Kodiak, Alaska, were mentioned as regional airports with lines that typically exceed 20 minutes.
"Even the most efficient large airports will typically take longer than that," he said.
Boston wrote a letter to USA Today that was published about a week after the story ran. His letter pointed out the obvious: In smaller airports such as Columbia, passengers are processed as a group just before boarding the flight, not throughout the day as passengers arrive.
In Columbia, Boston said in an interview, a typical batch of 15 passengers or so for a particular flight might take about 20 minutes, resulting in a much lower per-passenger average wait time.
"It's apples and oranges," Uselding, of the TSA, said. "It's kind of misleading; we've had all kinds of calls on it."
In other board business, Boston reported that he recently met with new city Public Works Director John Glascock about capital improvements to the airport.
The board yesterday compiled a "wish list" of improvements to the airport that ranged from a proposed $20,000 radar system for the control tower to millions for a 1,500-foot runway extension. Central Missouri Aviation General Manager Randy Clark said athletic teams that come to compete with the University of Missouri-Columbia typically use the St. Louis airport and drive to Columbia by bus because of runway issues.
Boston said that July passenger traffic was "disappointing" but that the cumulative total for the year is still up 18 percent over the same period in 2004.
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