PLANE TRAVEL Airport opens with more security

The airport has beefed up security with concrete barriers.
By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
VIENNA -- The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the remaining restrictions on aircraft travel at 11 a.m. Thursday, allowing stranded passengers across the country to begin their trips home.
More than 100 baggage-laden customers waited in the usually sleepy Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport as crews prepared their jets -- unexpectedly grounded since terrorist attacks Tuesday -- to continue flights to their scheduled destinations.
Security at the airport was heightened, with additional officers from the Vienna Police Department joining the one police officer usually on duty.
Officials present: Airline officials wearing badges from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport directed travelers through the airport's lone metal detector. The line was slow, but no unusual searches or security checks were in evidence.
"I'm just so eager about getting home I'm not thinking about [being] scared," said Nicole Yamamoto, a junior at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who said she was normally afraid of flying. Her flight, a TWA originating in Boston, resumed its trek to St. Louis midafternoon.
"No one has said what is going on in St. Louis," said Yamamoto, whose original plan was to catch a connecting flight to San Francisco. "No one has given me any idea yet."
Crews continued placing highway barriers on the median strip separating the airport parking lot from the airport even after the first of six stranded jets, an empty American Airlines Saab 340, departed for Albany, N.Y., at 11:30 a.m.
The next flight out was a C-130 military aircraft based in Minneapolis, which was diverted to the Youngstown Air Force Reserve Station Tuesday, a base spokesman said.
A Continental DC-10 going from Honolulu to Newark, carried only 48 passengers, about one-third the number that disembarked Tuesday. Many found their own way home by car or bus.
Good place: "Of all the places to stop, we were happy to stay here," said Miriam Settles, a money manager from Norfolk, Va., before reboarding the plane to Newark with her husband, an Air Force major. They reasoned that it would have been much more difficult to be stuck at a major airport.
"We were lucky," she said.