Allyen Speaks

Ok, I have been back in the good ole USA for over two weeks now and am just getting over my anger at Dulles International Airport customs. After 10 days on the road, the return trip was harrowing once we got to Dulles from Heathrow. Let me provide you with a detailed description of how things went down.

The eight hour flight from London was uneventful, we slept, watched a couple movies, listened to iPods, etc. Upon landing we taxied to a gate. No wait, the gate had a broken down airplane stuck there so lets park on the tarmac and unload the passengers on people mover vehicle thingies. The people movers must hit traffic in route because it took an eternity for the first one to arrive. We stood patiently waiting while the mover got loaded and just before Stacy and I were to board it was declared that the thingy was full. Now we must wait for the next mover to clear traffic and get to the plane. When the thingy gets to the plane it must park near the door of the plane and then engage the hydraulics to lift the mover cabin up to the level of the plane’s cabin. Once it is at the correct level. It adjusts the walkway to jut out and meet the plane’s sides and provide a safe method of boarding. This all takes time. Stacy and I board the thingy with 100 or so of the smelliest overseas travelers. For some reason, once the thingy was full we needed to stand still and wait for 10 minutes until at some unknown signal the doors were closed and the mover cabin was lowered to ground level and we made our way to the customs area.

The customs area was a nondescript rectangular concrete building without any pretense of design or comfort. I will do my best to describe how desolate, hot, crowded, and inefficient this building was. First, there were two baggage claim carousels on each right and left wall of the room. Down the middle of this room ran a serpentine queue for the customs security check. The queue ran the entire length of the building right down the middle between the baggage claim carousels on each side wall.

This room was a dull grey color with no furniture, no windows, no carpeting and apparently no air conditioning. Upon entering this wasteland we were told, “your bags are on carousel A”. Fine, we worked our way through a sea of bodies to A. After the whole plane is crowded around carousel A we hear over the PA system, “Those of you from flight so-and-so from London, your bags are on carousel D”. So with that simple statement 300 or so people began to move to the opposite side of the building across three perpendicular layers of the queue for customs. If there was any order prior to this, it disintegrated now and never recovered. People were going in every direction, stepping on toes, knocking over those rope guides that are meant to delineate the queue. I would say it was approaching chaos. I wanted to shove people that were shoving me but I stayed, not calm, but non-violent at least.

Once on the other side of the hot, stuffy room, we stood silently staring at the carousel waiting once again trying to ignore the chaos going on around us. When the bags finally arrive we are now free to get in the serpentine queue for the customs agents. By this time our connecting flight to Denver has been cancelled. It turns out that with everyone down in the customs dungeon no one could make it to the Denver plane and United Airlines, with a confused look, thinks to itself, “Gee, no one is showing up for this flight, guess we will cancel it and send it back to Denver empty.” One of the seemingly countless dirty little secrets in the airline industry is that a cancelled flight does not count negatively against the on-time departure stats. So, when in doubt, cancel it!

Once we were out of customs and trying to find an alternate way home, Stacy worked her magic with a customer service agent and got us on a flight later that night. So all-in-all, we spent 2.5 hours in customs, and another 4 hours in the airport at large.

This experience was the total opposite of every other customs experience we had on the trip. Dubai was a breeze. After a 25 minute walk from the plane to baggage claim, then to the customs desk it took the agent less than 30 seconds to look at and stamp our passports. We were on the airport curb getting into a taxi 30 minutes after getting off the plane! London was very good also. We waited in a queue for 20 minutes to get to the agent.

The Dulles customs experience was an embarrassment to the airport, the nations capital, and all of America. We were in this mess with people from all over the world and I could not believe we were presenting this as their first experience on American soil.