The SkyPriority counter lines didn�t look bad, although I didn�t get down that way too much today. The North elite line is marked twice, so pretty easy to find. I spent a certain amount of time walking up and down the North lines, and occasionally the South line, making sure passengers who were elite or PreCheck were not in the longer line. The CLEAR pax always seemed to know to look for that line, whereas the occasional person who gets PreCheck randomly doesn�t always realize it. I�m not certain whether there is a CLEAR+Elite combination. There were a lot of CLEAR staff at North today and what looked like new CLEAR kiosks.

South with PreCheck never looked very long.

The volunteers did receive information about the changes and requests (pleadings!) for volunteers to sign up for today and especially for 5am-noon. I wasn�t heroic enough to overcome the fact that I�m not a morning person; I signed up for 12-4 but found that it was busy and interesting enough to stay on for a double shift. In addition to dealing with the checkpoint changes, it was a busy day with lots of situations where passengers needed extra information and help. As a volunteer, today was the kind of day I most enjoy, with lots of different problems (some simple, some complex) to be solved, a certain amount of chaos, and lots of confused passengers.

BTW I've never been able to make any sense of the standard advice for USA airports to arrive two hours early for a domestic flight and three hours for international. The domestic and international check in and security lines are exactly the same, and at most the check in (if not OLCI) and bag drop deadlines are thirty minutes earlier for international. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to check the passport unless there's some major problem (and if you've forgotten the passport or it's expired, an hour certainly isn't enough time to fix that). The requirement (which varies slightly across carriers) to be at the gate thirty minutes in advance for international and fifteen for domestic is taken care of by the difference in check in and bag drop deadlines. So any reasonable calculation would suggest arriving thirty-five to forty minutes earlier for international.

Someone on TV news is saying that even with both CLEAR and PreCheck, an additional two hours should be allowed for TSA security at MSP. I don't understand how/why CLEAR doesn't seem to be working unless hundreds of people have decided to sign up for CLEAR this morning as a way to pay them $179 or whatever to avoid missing a flight, but I wouldn't think that so many people would even be aware of CLEAR.