Originally Posted by
Christopher
Flying via the US, though, means that you have to enter the US, in immigration terms. This is a huge nuisance for people who require a visa, and a major irritation on the trip for all non-US passengers: if you're on a flight that lasts some 24 hours and you have a two-hour stopover somewhere, you don't really want to spend it standing in a queue so that you can tell an immigration officer that you're going to be in the country for 20 minutes.
That's not how it happened when I flew LHR-AKL via LAX.
We were never allowed out of the (rather large) room. We had our passports checked but there was a special little immigration counter just for our flight, and just to make sure we were who we said we were. The flight came through there at the same time every day We might have technically entered the US but freedom of movement throughout the airport was not allowed.
In any event, the OP was already considering flying via SFO.
