In-Transit Waiting Area in USA Airports?
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 23 Jul, 2023
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A little bit more history:
My first two flights (60’s-70’s) from Europe to the US required "fueling stops" since at the time you couldn’t make it from Frankfurt to Los Angeles in a single go. One was in Bangor, Maine and the other in Winnipeg, Canada. In either case, passengers had to get off the plane were corralled in segregated area until the plane was ready to leave again.
With the advent of long range planes, that went away as well.
International sterile transit used to exist about 20 years ago in quite a few US airports. You’ll find a few references to it in this thread from 2001 on Flyertalk, though even at the time, it was considered quite the exception rather than the norm, apparently.
Note that is was quite different from sterile transit as you know it in quite a few other locations. Passengers in transit were escorted to a waiting area until the time of departure of their next flight, and were escorted to it as well. No waiting in the departures area, access to shops and restaurants, lounges, etc. Passports were kept by staff during the first flight and the duration of transit. Similar schemes exist nowadays for passengers of some nationalities in some countries, like Mexico.
This press release from 2003 tells us sterile transit, known as the International-to-International transit program (ITI), and TWOV (transit without visa) which went with it, were stopped quite abruptly at 11:00 a.m. EDT, Saturday August 2, 2003. It was so abrupt that the regulation has exceptions for passengers already in flight when it takes effect!
The idea (in the wake of 9/11) was probably to partially close the loophole of TWOV which allowed people from unfriendly countries to board a flight to the US with very little checks (they now need a visa and all the associated scrutiny). This was later extended to friendly countries with the introduction of ESTA.
Since it’s been nearly 20 years I’m a bit surprised there’s still visible signage left from back then!
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Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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