Fliers tell of mile-long security line in Chicago on Sunday

Flight delays and cancellations are usually the top fear for holiday travelers. Fortunately for fliers headed home from Thanksgiving on Sunday, there were only a few areas of moderate problems on the busy travel day. But there was a report of unusually long line Sunday morning at Chicago's Midway Airport.

Lines there stretched for more than a mile early on Sunday, according to Chicago-area media outlets. The queue to pass through Midway's Transportation Security Administration checkpoints snaked through the airport and out to the Chicago Transit Authority's Orange Line train station for several hours Sunday morning.

A reporter for Seattle TV station KOMO was among those stuck in the line. After checking in for her flight to Seattle, Denise Whitaker says she mapped the line and calculated a distance of 1.2 miles.

However long the Sunday morning line, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Aviation Department said she wasn't entirely surprised.

"This happens sometimes," aviation department spokeswoman Karen Pride tells the Chicago Sun-Times. "There was a period of time earlier this morning, between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m., that lines were long because that is when most people are traveling for the holiday period."

Sunday, of course, is the day that many travelers return home from the busy Thanksgiving holiday period. The day is among the busiest – if not the busiest -- day for air travel each year.

Despite that, Pride of the Chicago Aviation Department says the Midway Airport queue cleared after the first bank of morning flights went out. She tells the Sun-Times security wait times were relatively short by 9:15 a.m. local time.

Southwest passenger Emma Cronin told the Sun-Times the line was still backed up the whole way to the Orange Line stop when she arrived at the airport for her 9:50 a.m. flight to Boston. But Cronin backed up Pride's assertion that the lines cleared quickly.

"I was very surprised," Cronin told the Sun-Times. "The TSA people were helpful and the line moved very fast. I was really nervous about missing my flight, but I arrived at my gate and took off on time."

As for Whitaker, the KOMO reporter, she missed her flight before making it out on a later departure.

Overall, Sunday was a mostly smooth travel day for U.S. airline passengers. About 245 flights had been canceled nationwide, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. That's a relatively low number, but more than more-substantial 4,000 flights were delayed across the nation on the busy travel day.

The biggest problems on Sunday came in San Francisco, Denver and Los Angeles. In San Francisco, about 7% of the day's flights were canceled and more than a third delayed as winds created problems there. And, in Denver, about a third of the airport's flights suffered delays as fog affected operations. Only about 40 flights were canceled in Denver, accounting for only about 2% of the airport's daily schedule. In Los Angeles, about one in five flights were delayed there as clouds and rain moved through the area.