This has been touched on in another thread, and appears to be a serious problem. When I arrived home from Zambia last week via SAA/JNB, there was ONE (1) agent to clear the plane of over 300 passengers. Fortunately, the agent was working the returning citizens side, put the poor visitors to our country had NO agent for about 1/2 an hour. Welcome to the US!

I spoke to a MOC about it, and he was not aware of the problem. I would think that particularly in the nation's capitol, an old-fashioned letter-writing campaign might get the folks at Dulles pursueded to be more interested in serving and protecting the public.

What do you think? Should we start firing off emails and letters to our representatives, or should we just let them handle it in there own time?

Things will probably happen a lot quicker if the letters, phone calls, and emails are addressed to the media. If we let them handle it "in their own time" we could have more planes crashing into buildings before anything gets done. They had their chance. It's time to take it to a higher power-radio, newspaper, and TV.

Louis

Coming back from JHB to Dulles I found Immigration was incredibly slow. They had about four counters open, and had about 26 closed. I breezed through Customs after getting my gun.

While waiting for the gun to come out I noticed Stevie Wonder was waiting for his gear to clear. (I figured it probably wasn't a gun.)

He caused a pretty good stir, but everyone was respectful and gave him room to breathe. I started to take a photograph, but decided it was bad form, so I let it be. His crew was loading his gear back on the conveyor along with the rest of us loading our hunting gear.

I've seen this mentioned several times recently. Is it a recent development or has it been this way? I had the same experience - two officers for the entire plane - five years ago in Atlanta! Caused us to miss our connecting flight and considering she'd been away from our 18M.O. daughter for two weeks my wife was a basket case - probalby be detained today!

Anyway, the reason I ask is because I know a lot of homeland security staff have been "temporarily reassigned" to other locations and duties. So is this a recent thing due to the shuffeling of staff or has it been that way since SAA moved to Dulles?

That is really part of the big picture. Since SAA just started flying out of Dulles in June, many of us have not had experience on international arrivals in Washington. New York and Atlanta, and before that, Ft. Lauderdale, were the arrival cities, and I, for one, never had an extended wait getting through the initial "welcome home" customs screen. But of course that had everything to do with deployment of adquate personnel.

WRT "temp. reassigned", I came in in June via Atlanta, and they had plenty of officers. At Dulles in August, I only saw 3 officers during the entire clearing/baggage retrieval/declarations proceedure, and only 1 guy clearing the flight.

If this has been the (recent) experience of others, we need to write some letters.

I'm still ticked-off about missing the connecting flight when I got to Dulles last year becasue of their lack of manpower and generally screwed-up organization. They must be paying SAA to use that shit airport.

I used BA last year arriving at BWI (Baltimore). Clearance was extremely smooth with plenty of staff but I wouldn't reccomend BA if you're going hunting!

Last time I checked the Customs staffing levels were determined by the airlines. They are actually the ones that pay the customs people when they perform their duties at the airport.

If that is true, (airline pays for Customs service) it explains a great deal.

I am waiting for Delta to start their service out of Atlanta. I have all ways breezed thru customs there.

When I arrived in LA from New Zealand in JUne it was a night mare. Totally understaffed and slow in processing. When it was my turn with imagration the official looked at me and said "are you in a hurry" he must have seen my body language while waiting. I have never had this problem at Dullas. I wll say I found out later it is always this way on Tuesday because there is a flight from Guam comming in and I have never seen so many cardboard boxes outside a box factory. Why weren't they properly staffed when they knew this is the case every Tuesday. I fly in and out of Dullas most of the time and enjoy traveling thru there. Atlanta is not bad either.