Airports are ill-equipped for the traveling season

Travel, at the best of times, is an awesome way to explores new places and cultures, meet new people and create happy memories. Travel, at its worst, is absolutely awful.
I have not had many (if any) “good” experiences with traveling, especially with airports. From getting through security, to waiting in the terminal, and to being on the actual airplane, flying is a long slew of nightmares for everyone involved.
Just recently, I visited family in Georgia. My family and I took a plane from Ronald Reagan National Airport in D.C. to the Jacksonville Airport in Florida. It was a great trip, except for the flying.
To start out, Reagan Airport is one of the most inaccessible places in D.C. Even though we were on the road at 5:30 to catch our 9:15 flight, we got caught up in traffic and it took us longer than planned to get to the airport. The signage was confusing as well. However, security was the worst part.
I blundered through the lines like an uncertain and panicky bull in a china shop. I stepped through the security scanner and was immediately told to do it again, as I had stepped in too early. I was then patted down regardless. But, TSA is almost useless. According to a leaked report from the Transportation Security Administration, “investigators from the Department of Homeland Security managed to sneak weapons and fake bombs past airport screeners in 95% of their attempts to beat the system.”
All that expensive machinery and the screenings are almost all for naught.
When we got on the plane, the immediate problems were the seat size. Over the course of a few decades, seats have gotten a lot smaller. In 1985, the average seat size on American Airlines was 33 inches wide. Now, the average is 31. When you put into consideration that the average hip size of a woman is 36 inches, and the average in a man is 38, it doesn’t sound as roomy. The idea is that airliners can cram more passengers into smaller aircraft by reducing seat size, and leg space, but it just makes travel more of a nightmare for the average person.
The thing is that many of these travel nightmares can be avoided or fixed quite easily. The seat size can easily be enlarged, at the cost of a slight uptick in airplane prices. TSA can be revamped, and TSA agents can be given more rigorous courses in streamlining security and catching prohibited and dangerous items faster.
9th grade Humanities student Jaida Barksdale also shares her solution, “I would like them to make planes bigger,” she stated. “So that you don’t have to sit super squished together and widen the aisles, so you don’t put your butt in someones face when you walk to your seat.”