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Comment by bparsons | Hacker News Reader

The moment I could afford to, I started avoiding connecting flights in the United States wherever possible.

The user experience is appalling, from parking lot to gate.

I have visited places that take security very, very seriously (Israel, Russia, China etc.) and all manage to make the entire process more bearable than the United States. I don't really understand why they can't make their airports function.

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Because foreigners are not welcome.

Seriously, this isn't hard to understand. The US is an unfriendly, hostile nation. While most Americans, individually, are not unfriendly or hostile to foreigners, the government is decidedly so and has been for decades.

* Unless you have lots of money and plan to spend/invest it in the US

The "and" is critical in that statement.

I mean we did have 3,000 people die from airplanes being hijacked and flown into buildings - the TSA didn't exist before then. Unfortunately our gov't is like an overreacting immune system inflaming the entire body and causing unnecessary damage to functioning systems.

edit: Also Canadians in here, let's not pretend like CBSA's shit doesn't stink

You should try reading the link first. The TSA is not the issue under discussion. It's Customs and Border Patrol that's the issue.

You should try reading the HN guidelines first that say not to accuse someone of not reading the article. Sometimes discussions can meander outside the original article's context.

CBSA uses the exact same security standards as TSA, but manages to make the airport security process much, much faster. I think it comes down to airport design and staffing resources.

It's just Americans being really had at organisation, training, planning especially in government. They also hate government so underfund it so they hire bottom barrell people to be agents.

It's not that foreigners aren't welcome. If that were true, we'd just ban foreigners and refuse to issue visas. It's a lot simpler and possibly more unpleasant to think about than that: we don't care about you. Foreign tourism isn't important to us. You don't pay the bills for all this bureaucracy, and he who pays the piper calls the tunes. You don't call the tunes, US taxpayers do.

Legacy. The US designed air transportation and had an airport in every city before any thought was even given to the concept of transit. The airports are designed to get people to and from the United States, not for people on a hop between other countries.

Yes, this is a competitive disadvantage. I don't think there is a lot of money around to solve this problem. I'm sure if, say, the Port Authority wanted to have a sterile transit area in JFK, they could probably convince the federal government to allow it. But they don't care. Nobody with money cares. Therein lies the problem.

Yeah most of the people commenting in this thread probably come from countries where major airports are used primarily for international transit, and run by for-profit companies that want to maximize transfer passengers.

They have no concept of an airport getting 90 million domestic passengers a year.

And yet of the top ten airports, all of whom do at least 75% of ATL's traffic, 7 are not in the US, and display similar characteristics of international traffic versus domestic.

I'm amused by the notion or implication that other countries are far more capitalistic and profit motivated than the US - when it comes to airports.

In some ways they are, like retail. The British Airports Authority used to be listed on the LSE as a retail stock, because Duty-Free Shopping (an afterthought in most US international airports) was such a big proportion of their revenues.

Oh, I have absolutely no doubt. I mean more that the implication that in the US, profoundly capitalist, at times to a fault, has airports as a bastion of socialized community benefit.

I'm assuming this is Atlanta? Got a source?

Yeah

> International passengers traveling to, from and through Atlanta in 2017 rose by 4.86 percent to 12,033,865, while cargo operations were up 5.66 percent. Overall, Hartsfield-Jackson hosted 103,902,992 passengers last year...

https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2018/01/30/hartsfie...

Wow. I'm surprised that 90% is domestic for the busiest airport in the world, but I'm Canadian.

Thanks!

Same here. In fact, I have actively avoided travelling to the US for the past four years, which means I have mostly missed conferences. I would really like to travel there again, I have friends and favourite places, but the hassle is just too much, even with a passport that makes things easier than average. Sad! :-)

I'm guessing the sheer volume of air travel in the US is one problem.

Example: I travelled to Israel a couple of times for work. Their security is world class, but they take a more predictive approach: having trained people interview all passengers even before checkin and look for subtle body language clues or inconsistencies, as well as your nationality/ethnicity/previous travel to gauge the level of risk.

This is effective but it wouldn't be able to scale for a country as big as the US (300M vs 8M people); these are trained professionals, not folks that get paid a low hourly wage as is the case with the TSA.

Using race as a proxy for suspicion would probably scale just fine, however, there are other reasons it is unlikely to work in the US.

Not the least of which is ethnic profiling is probably Unconstitutional and unlikely to pass judicial review.

Mostly because it's theater instead of security.

Because of political correctness. All the airplane terrorism has been committed by Muslim males under 35, therefore the TSA has to search little old ladies.

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