To add insult to injury, he was late on that particular day because he was trying to prove a point to his mom. “I could see check-in, I could see my flight listed, and I was waving my arms to try and get someone’s attention.” Covucci was eventually freed from the revolving door, but check-in for his flight had already closed. “I got into a revolving door at the airport and it was going so slow, so I shoved it and it seized up,” he says. The worst miss for David Covucci, a friend of mine in New York, happened in Spain. Most purposeful late arrivers have similar stories. He most recently missed a flight last summer, when the gate door was closed right in front of him after a last-second dash. “Everything is arranged in a way that nothing can go wrong, and if one thing goes wrong in that sequence of events, I’m screwed,” he says. Still, he admits it’s a risky game every time. He also has TSA PreCheck and never checks his luggage. Herrera says he usually consults Google Maps and traffic information to determine the latest possible time he can leave. I’ll be the last person to board the plane, no matter where I’m sitting.” “I kind of love the drama of running through an airport,” says Mac Joseph, a friend of mine who works in public relations. Indeed, the thrill was the main draw for every purposeful late arriver I spoke with. “Tweeting about it is kind of fun and adds some drama,” he told me, as though the looming prospect of a missed flight wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the first time Herrera had told the world about being purposefully late for a flight. “Feel like I haven’t been this early for a flight in years tbqh, might stop for a snack on the way.” That message and the updates that followed it garnered dozens of responses, mostly from people who could feel their own blood pressure rising as they imagined arriving to an airport on a holiday weekend with less than an hour to make it from the curb to their seat. Flight’s at 2:45, boards at 2:20, my Lyft’s ETA at the airport is 1:48,” he wrote. I started talking with friends and co-workers about their air-travel habits after Tim Herrera, an editor at The New York Times, live-tweeted his journey to the airport last Friday. Their motivations are much more psychologically complicated. ![]() But the willfully tardy are not simply trying to annoy their friends and family. To the preternaturally punctual of the world, it can feel as though people like Cushing were put on this planet as an obstacle to our own timely destinies. “I just really live for the feeling of literally running through the airport barefoot because you didn’t have time to put your shoes on after security, and your laptop is in your hand because you didn’t have time to put it back,” says my colleague Ellen Cushing, a senior editor at The Atlantic. But a smaller group of frequent fliers heads into air travel with lateness as the goal, relishing the thrill of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Some chronically late people do, of course, intend to be on time. Why would anyone look at an experience as expensive and anxiety-inducing as flying and want to make it a little bit riskier? Their suitcase’s wheels probably won’t cooperate for portions of their journey, sending it flailing behind them as they move as quickly as their new vacation sandals allow.īecause I’m a compulsively early person, I’ve always assumed the other people trucking through the airport were doing their best to be on time, even if their best was different from my own (superior) best. They’re weaving between on-time travelers at a speed somewhere between a power walk and a sprint, or they’re elbow-dancing their way to the front of the TSA line to plead their case for immediate screening. ![]() It’s not hard to spot people about to miss a flight.
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