This advice right here, that you should always arrive at the airport with two hours to spare, is because of where I am sitting right now.

This is gate 52 at LAX. Gate 52 is in Terminal 5. It's one of the harder gates to get to because of the absolutely insane way they built LAX where it is so car-centric that it takes longer to get from the LAX sign to LAX than it takes for me to get from downtown Missoula to the Missoula International Airport. But they love cars here, so they're doing what they're doing.

Anyway, you can see from this map that is a screenshot of Google Maps right now for me that despite the fact that I am technically in Terminal 5 my little blue dot is not on Terminal 5. And here is all of LAX. And my blue dot is still not on any of LAX. We have to zoom out a little bit further. There I am, at the regional terminal. Which is, for some reason, gate 52. Gate 52 is what they call a phantom gate. It is not actually a gate. It is, in fact, it's own terminal. And it is building that is not in any way touched by the Los Angeles International Airport.

So to get to Gate 52-H, you have to go to Gate 52, which is in Terminal 5. You go to Gate 52, and that does not put you on a plane, and instead it puts you on a bus, and that bus has to cross the ground that the planes are driving on, and the planes, as you might imagine, get priority.

So sometimes that bus ride could take just about 5 minutes, but it could also take sometimes like 30 minutes. And that's a normal situation that can occur, and if you add that situation to the normal long security lines of the Los Angeles International Airport, and then you add that to the normal very bad traffic as you come in to the Los Angeles International Airport, you arrive at the maximum normal time that it could take to go from arriving at an airport, to getting to the gate. 

There are other airports that have situations like this, but I think that Gate 52 at LAX is one of the peak situations, especially because of the unpredictability of the bus ride, because if there's a lot of plane traffic the busses have- I've had this situation- where the bus will just have to stop and wait for plane traffic for up to 15 minutes.

But because we have to give one single piece of advice to everyone, we say, "Give 2 hours, and that way everyone will make it."
But we're in a situation where 95% of airports, an hour is enough time as long as you have your boarding pass in hand, and especially if you don't have any bags to check. And then at 99% of airports, 90 minutes is definitely enough. 

And of course there's many things that effect this. How far is the parking structure away if you're leaving your car, do you have TSA pre-check, et cetera. But if you know your local airport, and some person with you is insisting that they SAY you have to leave 2 hours, they're wrong. It is a good idea to leave about an hour just in case something goes wrong, you can't find a parking spot, or some weird thing like that. 

But remember, and this doesn't just go for airports, there are many situations where the single piece of advice that is being given, is so that everyone that that advice could apply to is going to have a positive outcome and not feel like they have been left in the lurch. And in the case of a situation like Gate 52 at LAX, all the people in this little area who are right off to Missoula, Montana and Boise, Idoho, are the reason why you are getting advice that almost definitely doesn't apply to you.

So if you know how things work at your airport, don't let somebody tell you that you need to leave 2 whole hours when you could easily be leaving 70 minutes, and being just fine, having plenty of time at the gate to make a little vlog.