Nine Secrets I Never Knew About Airports Until I Worked at LAX
From dead bodies in the security line to a cobra in a Pringles can, you wouldn’t believe the crazy things that happen at America’s busiest airport of origin
By Brandon Presser
The airport of your imagination probably looks like the one in Love Actually: a haven of happy tears where adventures begin and families reunite. In real life, airports are upside-down worlds where it’s perfectly acceptable to wear pajamas in public, guzzle martinis at 8:15 a.m., and ignore all etiquette around lining up.
All this informed the 2004 NBC television drama LAX, starring Heather Locklear as a superwoman managing the airport’s 55,000 workers and 240,000 daily passengers. The show was canceled after one season; apparently America didn’t think its busiest airport of origin was interesting.
They were wrong. According to James Janovec, the superintendent of operations on whom Locklear’s character was loosely based, a plane takes off roughly every 50 seconds at LAX. The facility has more TSA agents than anywhere else, screening 100 passengers a minute in the busiest weeks.
So when LAX offered me the opportunity to work with its TSA and U.S. Customs and…
