Can't read the article, but was the company shuttle flying out of general aviation? The time saved by avoiding commercial flight screening processes was probably substantial. An MSN article [1] shows they flew out of Hillsboro airport, which doesn't have commercial scheduled passenger flight operations as far as I can tell, and is also much closer to the Intel office. So a lot of potential time and hassle savings.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/intel-grounds-employee...