In the year ended 30 June 2015, 980,000 Australian residents visited the USA. I salute you one and all. Big, powerful, varied, exciting and entrancingly corpulent as the USA may be, if you plan to travel around the country by air, beware, the airports are like human zoos. How is it that a country with the wealth and technological genius of the USA, with the eager-to-please work ethic delivers such gobsmacking abominations of airports? US airports are mostly crowded, stinky, badly organised and governed by venomous officials whose mission appears to be to frustrate any slender hope you might have of getting anywhere.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Award for the title of most hated airport in the USA goes to New York's LaGuardia Airport, which Vice President Joe Biden said "feels like it's in some Third World country". He was being diplomatic. In a Gizmodo survey to find the worst airport in America, one responder labelled LaGuardia "a 75-year-old loaded diaper". Other nominees included Chicago's O'Hare International "I HATE O'Hare with a fiery passion that will endure through countless generations of my progeny," Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport "On your way to hell there's a layover in Atlanta," and Philadelphia International Airport "Philly is where dreams go to die while you sit in a wormhole of constantly cancelled or delayed flights."
A common theme resonating throughout these complaints is how spectacularly US travellers hate the Transport Security Administration. It's the TSA that is responsible for the security checks, the removing of shoes, the frisking, the questioning that endows every airport departure with a long, shuffling queue, and they're getting worse.
According to the US Department of Transportation's monthly Air Travel Consumer Report released in May 2016, complaints filed on such topics as courtesy and processing time peaked in March when measured against the year average. Complaints over the time taken by TSA screening grew more than 10-fold, over lack of courtesy by TSA screeners increased three times, while complaints relating to screening of travellers' personal property were also at the highest levels recorded over the past year.
So what's the deal for Australians heading for the USA, and looking to make their airline travel as painless as possible?
Australia is part of the Visa Waiver Program, which means Australians are eligible to enter the USA without a visa. Provided you have an Australian e-passport, you can apply online at the website of the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Note that there are plenty of scam websites who will offer to do this or you – at a price far higher than the $US14 that the official ESTA website charges, so make sure you're at the right site: esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta
To further expedite entry for international travellers, US Customs and Border Protection operates a scheme known as Global Entry, which gives faster clearance for low-risk travellers. Travellers must be pre-approved for the Global Entry program, which allows you to have your passport and fingerprints scanned at a Global Entry electronic kiosk rather that queuing for scrutiny by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer.
Global Entry is available at major airports but here's the rub – GE is not available to anyone travelling on an Australian passport. Those travelling on a British, German, Panamanian, Singaporean, South Korean or Mexican passport can however, and if that applies to you, see the US Customs and Border Protection website: cbp.gov
If you're one of the GE elect you can also apply for TSA PreCheck. This enables you to skip the long security queues at just about every US airport in favour of a much shorter one, without the need to remove shoes, laptops, belts and light jackets. According to the TSA, 99 per cent of PreCheck passengers waited in line for less than five minutes in 2015. However getting through the PreCheck approval process is a rigmarole, and only worthwhile if you're doing a lot of travelling through US airports. It involves an interview at an application centre, fingerprinting and a US$85 fee. First step is the TSA PreCheck website: tsa.gov/tsa-precheck
In yet another hurdle for visitors, the US Department of Homeland Security has recently proposed for discussion and possible legislation that applicants for the Visa Waiver Program be asked to provide information relating to their social media accounts. The rationale is that what you say on social media might flash a warning light to the sniffers charged with weeding out terrorists. Providing the information would be voluntary, which only adds to the cretinous absurdity of this idea.
So how can the Aussie traveller make their transit through US airports as painless as possible?
Here's what the character Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney in the 2009 movie Up in the Air, had to say about it. Hand luggage only, and "Never get behind people travelling with infants, old people have bodies littered with hidden metal and they have no appreciation for how little time they have left on earth but Asians pack light, travel efficiently and they've got a thing for slip-on shoes." "That's racist" says his travelling colleague. "I'm like my mother," says Bingham. "I stereotype. It's faster."
