I just saw a commercial for Southwest Air Lines. A bunch of folks are having a telecon, and are surprised to find that one of the participants is not in the office, and thus unavailable. A secretary pops her head into the conference room, and says that so-and-so is about to join them in person.

Then the announcer makes the point that travel is affordable–Southwest will get you anywhere for $299 one way.

Yeah, well, that’s nice, I guess.

The problem is, that when I go to LAX, the longest security line that I see is at Terminal 1–Southwest. This is particularly irritating, because it holds up vehicular traffic as well, and since it’s Terminal 1, it creates a bottleneck into the airport for other terminals. Once past the first terminal, the traffic flow improves signicantly.

Sure, you can fly cheap, if your time has no value, but who wants to stand in a long security line? Now admittedly, this may be because Southwest is prospering with its low fares, and low costs, and black ink. But they have to understand that they’re not going to pull in business travelers with ads about how cheap their tickets are, if they know that they’re going to have to get to the airport an hour earlier to stand in line in security. And you can’t just blame Norm Mineta and his confederacy of dunces at DOT (though they undoubtedly make the problem worse), because it seems to be a problem unique to Southwest.

My question–is it just LAX, or are the Southwest lines worse than the others in other major cities?