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The Embarrassment That Is the LAX Bradley Terminal

January 16th, 2017 · 3 Comments · tourism, Travel

Summer smog?

That’s nothing.

Risk of the Big One earthquake?

No matter.

Thousands of arriving foreign tourists exposed to the chaos of the Tom Bradley Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport?

That’s a daily killer to La-La Land’s reputation.

Take, for example, a Monday afternoon in mid-January.

For several hundred of us arriving on Air France flight 66, the LAX ordeal began with an ontime landing in Los Angeles, not something that regularly happens.

Followed by an announcement by Air France personnel that the passport and customs areas at the Bradley terminal — the focal point of most foreign landings at LAX — were overwhelmed by travelers, and passengers would have to stay on the plane for another “five or 10 minutes”. Which turned into an additional “five or 10 minutes”  (as it always does) and ultimately a half hour of sitting on a plane that has been connected to a jetway the whole time.

This after more than 11 hours inside an Airbus 380, including boarding and time in the air.

Give L.A.-based officials this: They were, in fact, overwhelmed by numbers.

We encountered that as we joined the mob of travelers hoping to get out of the airport.

Oh, look, there’s the A380 from Dubai. And there’s the jumbo from Seoul. And there’s an arrivals hall so crowded it is probably about 5 percent more travelers from some sort of overcrowding tragedy.

To handle the crowd, sorta, authorities have constructed mazes of roped-off aisles that snake up and back and sometimes over there. It’s like standing in line for the Matterhorn on the Fourth of July, except the Matterhorn line moves more quickly and doesn’t have as many screaming babies.

And this is for citizens and Green Card holders. Welcome home, Yanks and would-be Yanks. If you think this is bad, go look at how we handle the foreigners.

So, after 20 minutes of shuffling nowhere, U.S. travelers reach an area where they can process their own customs form on computer kiosks — even though they all got customs forms on the planes they came in on. (Now we all have two customs forms; how about we settle on one or the other?)

Mostly, it seems like another way of killing time before joining a new eternal line, this one made up of several hundred people and squalling babies who are processed by a grand total of four federal agents, who ask two of the same four questions you have heard for a lifetime before stamping passports and sending people ahead. Time spent with agent? Perhaps 20 seconds.

We have been on the ground an hour.

Then it is baggage claim, and a moment of uplift. Our bags are there.

Well, just about everyone’s bags are there because very few of the 400-plus people on AF66 have fought their way forward to that point yet.

But this moment of “we’re not far from getting out” ends immediately as we join the tail end of a football-field-size mob of people pushing their baggage carts toward some customs-agents stations somewhere far in the distance of another hellish line.

People are jostling for advantages of six inches, and many are struck by the trolley behind them as the crowd (by now, well on the way to “angry” at the process and all the way home on “embarrassed”) nudges forward through an unmarked hall vaguely demarcated into five or six lines.

The horror of this is that it is not until 15 minutes or so of nudging forward can the traveler see that the handful of customs guys are still 75 yards away.

Finally … finally … we get to the front, and our line had been going to the agent over there, and now it’s supposed to go to a different agent over there (as the agents brusquely inform us, as if their free-form crowd control should be obvious without explanation). Our two paper forms making clear we are not bringing in meat from another country are glanced at by the scowling customs guy, and then we are sent on our way.

It has taken us 1 hour and 45 minutes to get off the plane, have our passports stamped and allow us to push our luggage to the reception area, which also is a mob scene of friends and relatives who got a call nearly two hours ago that “my plane is on the ground” and came rushing to LAX to meet loved ones/friends.

It is awful. It is horrible. It is dispiriting.

It is the worst possible “welcome to L.A.!” the city could contrive, with the aid of federal agencies.

This has been going on for years and has not been solved.

Stagger the plane arrivals, if your system cannot handle more than one or two new planes every 15 minutes.

Put on more agents, both at passport control and at customs. Hire more people to stand in the middle of mobs and direct anxious and confused people.

Build a giant shed, if you want, to handle the arriving crowds, so that exhausted travelers are not shoved through a long, stressful, wasteful, demeaning experience that says: “LAX is broken. Good luck with the rest of it.”

LAX is such a disaster for travelers that it is nearly impossible to imagine foreigners would want to go through the experience of arriving at Los Angeles ever again.

It needs new infrastructure and it needs more staffing and it needs it now, before permanent damage is done to the SoCal tourism industry. LAX is a disgrace and the worst possible first impression of a “world city”.

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 David // Jan 17, 2017 at 7:55 PM

    No doubt, LAX is America’s largest third-world airport, but the customs thing always has the potential to be horrible everywhere. When I was flying home from Orlando last summer, I ended up in the TSA line behind a British family. They said it had taken well over two hours to clear customs on their inbound flight, in an area that lacked adequate air conditioning or much in the way of other basic facilities. They were shocked how badly it was organized.

  • 2 Gene // Jan 18, 2017 at 10:03 PM

    Check out Global Entry. (https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry) It does not fix the real problems for international arrivals at LAX (or JFK or Newark for that matter), but it certainly would make your personal problem manageable. You still would be stuck with the 30 minutes on the plane, but once off, you just blow by those lines at immigration (in fact, it is a bit uncomfortable to walk by those hundreds of people waiting in line). Once your bags finally show up, you again just blow by the lines at customs.

    The price has gone up to $100 and the permit requires a personal interview (mine consisted of the interviewer asking me for my address). Depending on the length of your stay in the US, scheduling the interview may be a problem.

  • 3 Randy // Jan 24, 2017 at 12:20 PM

    Your rant makes you come off as one big spoiled brat. And a pussy too.

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