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Comment by ebiggs | Hacker News Reader

At large airports most, if not all, domestic flights are not serviced in the international terminal for the very reason that once you're past security in the international terminal you are going to be subject to customs and border protection if you were to leave that secure area (recall departure and arrival share the same secure space)

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In my experience this is extremely rare. I've flown into a lot of airports internationally over the years (offhand, Dulles, O'Hare, JFK, Paris de Gaulle, London Stansted, Heathrow, Madrid, Beijing, Cancun, Tokyo, maybe one or two more that I'm forgetting) and I don't think I've ever seen a situation like you describe. Madrid might have been like that, I can't quite recall, but the rest definitely weren't. Instead, you get offloaded into a special area that's only for international arrivals, where your only exit is through customs. Usually this is accomplished with a clever arrangement of locking doors, so that the same gate can then be used for boarding passengers without moving the plane.

Is LAX different?

Amsterdam's Schiphol airport is the way he described.

I forgot, I've done Amsterdam once or twice as well, but don't remember what the arrivals procedure was like anymore.

LAX is not, Tegel-Berlin definitely is. It's not universal either way.

ebiggs is describing the way things work in many airports in Europe (and some in Canada, when there's US customs preclearance).

But it's not at all the way things work in US airports with international service.

Yes, this is the case for airports that offer "sterile transit" (making an international connection without formally arriving in the transit country). In that case, international passengers and domestic passengers would be segregate (with Schengen passengers treated as "domestic" in the Schengen area).

The U.S. doesn't offer this, seemingly as a matter of policy, something which really annoys international travelers -- it's one of the most-complained-about U.S. policies on sites like FlyerTalk, even by U.S. citizens (because you can easily spend 1-2 hours clearing immigration, customs, and security for an international flight connection in the U.S. even if you didn't intend to visit the U.S. at all).

But as a result, almost all U.S. airports have some departing international and domestic passengers in the same terminal at the same time, or potentially allow both international and domestic departures from any terminal.

Houston used to do this in 2000. Don't know what has happened since. (Flew Mexico to Japan without entering US.)

I also heard that LAX used to have sterile transit for a particular pair of flights (I think operated by the same airline).

I imagine it might come down to how much money the airline is willing to put into the necessary infrastructure. Paranoid security changes after 2001 might also have shut that sort of thing down.

Yeah, maybe an airline can say to the airport/CBP "we'll pay to rent a lounge/corridor/gates at this airport in this terminal for a sterile transit option between our flights or our partners' flights because some passengers want that" and maybe the airport/CBP can approve the proposal. (Maybe non-U.S. passport holders will still require an ESTA, but not a CBP examination?)

I think the specific option at LAX was post-2001, but you had to be on a specific pair of flights to take advantage of it. (I didn't do it, I just read about it on FlyerTalk and forgot the details.)

In the US, large international airports don't work that way.

Yesterday I had a purely-domestic itinerary out of Philadelphia -- which is an international hub for US Airways/American Airlines -- and while waiting on my flight I wandered in and out of the international terminal several times without facing any additional security (I like watching the larger planes come and go, and the lounge in that terminal is nicer).

Which is the standard way international airports work in the US. There is no concept of "once you cross this point, you have to clear customs again to exit the terminal" here.

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