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Originally Posted by Rail Claimore
I'm not sure how long you've been flying, but I flew frequently across the Pacific to Japan and South Korea in the 1980's and early 1990's before Russian Air Space was opened up. LAX had just done a major expansion in the early 80's with the current Bradley Terminal and T2, plus separating arrival and departure roadways for cars. No one back then foresaw the types of planes we'd have that could fly to East Asia nonstop from the Eastern US and the increase in transpacific traffic from those hubs making daily flights to Tokyo and Seoul viable from airports like ORD and ATL. Everyone and everything in those days was routed through LAX if you didn't want to stop in ANC or fork over obscene amounts of money to fly on limited one-stops from back East.
On your point about SFO, from a passenger perspective, it's only marginally better than LAX because it has more terminal space per passenger. But it suffers from the same problems for connecting passengers as LAX does if you're flying any airline but United: you have to re-clear security.
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I haven't taken an international flight since 1981, when I lived on the east coast. Since then, all the flying I've done has been domestic. Since the security hysteria took over and the airlines began deciding they were in the business of treating their passengers like they were cargo, I haven't flown much at all if I could avoid it (when I go to San Francisco, most of the time I drive).
SFO does still make people re-clear security, but they have dealt with the more difficult problem with their internal trains and their connection directly to BART (part of the reason SFO is better is that the Bay Area actually has a mass transit system, unlike L. A.). SFO is also cleaner, brighter, and has better amenities. The only part of SFO I don't like is that damned, long United concourse and even with that, they made getting to the end of it easier by installing moving walks, technology that was introduced in the late '50s at the old Love Field airport in Dallas. LAX simply hasn't kept up or even attempted to.