Holiday air travel goes smoothly
Joke sign about terrorism delays Atlanta flight four hours
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Holiday travelers make their way to the check-in counter at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
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CNN's Elaine Quijano on ways to avoid lengthy delays at the nation's airports this holiday season.
CNN's Michael Okwu and Kris Osborn check travel at LaGuardia and O'Hare as the Wednesday rush starts.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Despite predictions of delays for security screening at airports around the nation, air travelers encountered few hassles during this year's Thanksgiving holiday.
Transportation Security Administration officials had warned the holiday crush could spell endless lines at airport security screening points. But that did not happen.
Even Sunday, the year's busiest travel day, the lines for the most part were not long.
After hugging her parents goodbye, college student Melissa Dolinsky breezed through security Sunday afternoon at Reagan National Airport in Washington.
"I honestly expected there to be huge crowds and having to fight my way through, everyone shoving each other, and there's been no crowd at all," she said.
As of 5 p.m., Miami International Airport's 45-minute delays at a passenger-screening checkpoint were the longest reported at any major airport, TSA spokeswoman Deirdre O'Sullivan said.
Reagan National and LaGuardia in New York reported eight-minute waits to get through security.
The delays were half that -- just four minutes -- at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
Boston's Logan International Airport and Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport reported 10-minute delays.
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported just one-minute delays, and Baltimore-Washington International Airport reported three-minute delays.
To ease the travel crunch during the holiday weekend, the TSA had added part-timers and canceled leave for federal screeners. The agency recently cut 6,000 screener positions.
More people are traveling by air this year than last. The travel group AAA estimated air travel this Thanksgiving exceeded travel last Thanksgiving by 1 percent, with 4.6 million people traveling by air.
The number of people flying is still 10-15 percent below levels before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In all, AAA predicted that about 36 million people would travel 50 miles or more from home over the holiday, the largest number since September 11.
Joke turns sour
One egregious delay was reported at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport.
An AirTran Airbus A320 packed with 156 passengers bound for San Francisco, California, was delayed four hours Sunday when an airline worker noticed a sticker reading "Terrorism Equals War" affixed to the cabin door's exterior, airline spokesman Tad Hutcheson said.
Once notified, the captain returned the plane to the gate, where the sticker was deemed a possible security threat, Hutcheson said.
All passengers were ordered off with their luggage and re-screened by 12 TSA employees pulled away from their duties at the main terminal, he said.
After almost three hours, the passengers and crew were allowed to re-board, including a man who admitted having placed the sticker on the door, Hutcheson said.
The flight departed at 1:32 p.m., more than four hours behind schedule.
"It was a practical joke taken a little too far," Hutcheson said.
No charges were filed against the passenger, but he suffered another kind of punishment: "The worse thing is to fly with the 155 people he delayed," Hutcheson said.
CNN's Patty Davis contributed to this report.
