Last weekend I went to Arkansas for a friend’s wedding reception. It was a quick trip — I flew from LAX into Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA) on Saturday and flew out on Sunday. XNA is a pretty appropriate code since there is one terminal with 10 gates and it’s in the middle of nowhere. I thought we were going to land on cows as we were descending. Anyway, I digress.
As I was leaving on Sunday, I showed my boarding pass and CA driver’s license to the nice woman checking them so that I could go through security. She looks at my driver’s license and notices that it’s expired. I actually had NO idea it was expired but it had been for about 6 days. I had to go get my boarding pass reissued with special security markings and then be thoroughly screened by security. Since XNA is so small, this all took about 5 minutes so I wasn’t annoyed.
Then, I go to board the plane. Before we’re allowed to board, there is a security person checking all bags to ensure that there are no liquids, gels, etc going on to the plane. He also was super friendly and it only took about a minute.
You’ve probably caught on that this was on my return. NONE of this happened at LAX. My license was expired when I went through security there but no one noticed. Also, no one would have had any idea if I had liquids or gels with me on the plane because no one checked.
It’s so frustrating that LAX, one of the largest airports in the nation that services one of the largest cities, is not as diligent on security as XNA.
