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Comment by swasheck | Hacker News Reader

Seattle struggles mightily with this. Four international heavy flights arriving within 45 minutes of each other and you are stuck in customs for six hours

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I can't speak for Seattle but airport capacity seems the secondary issue. The primary being that US is just flabbergastingly inefficient.

A layover in the US almost always translates to me missing my connecting flight when I go in or out of this country. No matter what airport I go through.

This is true, a lot of other countries do it better. I found Iceland customs to be particularity efficient. Iceland air uses both the front and rear doors of the plane which also speeds things up.

In Fiji they have a band that plays songs for you as you stand in the customs line, can you imagine that in Seattle?

Sounds like Nirvana?

Yes. It's insanely inefficient, but some spots are better than others. Seattle has some very real, physical bottlenecks that cause very long delays. We thought we were safe with a 6 hour layover, but we very nearly missed our connection.

Yeah but a lot of this is because the US has a very self-centric world view, they think everyone is coming to visit them and have no concept at all of an international transfer. In particular they don't have real international departure lounges (that you can't just walk out of without going back thru immigration) like the rest of the world.

Anywhere else on the planet you would pass through a metal detector to get upstairs to the departure lounge and get on your plane.

This is why if you are travelling to Europe from NZ (as I will be on Monday) Singapore/Hong Kong/Shanghai/Tokyo are better candidates for transfers than LAX/SFO

This happened on a recent trip for us. We connected in San Francisco (to Kona, HI). Met up with my girlfriend's sister just fine. Her other sister and brother-in-law, however...

We flew from Toronto to SF, had a 7 hour layover. It was grand. We even went downtown and back with plenty of time. Her one sister flew in from Vancouver—also no problems.

Her other relatives flew in from Victoria, and got stuck in customs at SFO for over 3 hours when their layover was scheduled to be just over an hour. They had to rely on the graciousness of the airline to get them on another flight. They had to take a 4 am flight to Honolulu which had a 4-5 hour layover then connect to Kona. The Iron Man race was the next day that we went to see. They didn't get to sleep for 30+ hours. I mean, there are worse cases where you'll have to endure that kind of stuff. Calfornia->Hawaii is a pretty good place for it to happen. But still.

We were through US customs at YYZ in about 20 minutes.

On another hand we took the Victoria -> Seattle Clipper ferry and US Customs in the Seattle port just sort of hand-waved us through.

Customs in the US is a two-tier experience: with Global Entry (which isn't that expensive or hard to get) you just glide through, even at SFO.

> got stuck in customs at SFO for over 3 hours when their layover was scheduled to be just over an hour.

Less than two hours for an international-domestic transfer is crazy at ANY airport, USian or otherwise.

I've made a 45 min transfer at Beijing, they did miss one of my bag though.

I waited almost 3 to pick up my wife in Boston some years back because of the same issue.

If only they knew when those flights were arriving so they could schedule customs and immigration staff to handle the traffic /s

> If only they knew when those flights were arriving so they could schedule customs and immigration staff to handle the traffic /s

Took me a few seconds to get this...:)

It sounds trivial but it's not always that easy. I was on a flight from Narita to SeaTac that got a nice jetstream tailwind of around 200mph for most of the cruise. The same applied to another flight from Incheon to SeaTac.

Both of these flights were originally scheduled to land around 8am. They landed around 5am so they had 2 CBP officers on shift to handle a 767 and a 777's worth of people. That mess ate up the entire gain of arriving early.

They would have known about the early arrival not too much earlier than the departure time (order of hours, not days), which isn't really enough time to shift people's work schedules.

I agree that the logistics involved are not that simple. However, it _does_ appear to be a regular occurrence at SeaTac and there's not much that's different (went through that 3 times in 2 months and the experience was the same each time). Anyway, at risk of this going way OT, it was my colloquial evidence that not every airport is equipped to handle multiple concurrent international heavies.

Ever notice how only government services have hours long wait times: DMV, immigration, passport services, city hall, etc. Government has no incentive to optimize.

...in the US.

Many private services have long wait times too. It's not just a government thing.

Good thing they are fixing this issue, though it won't be open for another couple years. My cousin is one of the engineers on the project, pretty cool stuff going on on that project, some of it has never been done before.

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