Originally Posted by
Justinus
Last November the Swedish authorities signed a contract about US Immigration Preclearance that will be installed at ARN. (This makes possible the US Immigration control to take place at Arlanda and the flight will arrive as a domestic flight to the US airport). As far as I know, in Europe and in the Middle East such preclearance exists only at Shannon, Dublin - and Abu Dhabi (I wonder why...).
Any rumors about HEL joining that group? After all, with SFO starting on 1 June AY will regularly fly to four US airports. For pax it would be a great advantage - especially for those connecting to other US flights.
As a passenger who very frequently flies from the Nordic countries to the US, US CBP Preclearance at HEL would be a disadvantage to me.
It would make the MCTs and check-in cut-off times at HEL worse for passengers in the main. And so I hope AY and Finland tell my government to go pound sand when it comes to this and get back to fixing US immigration/customs handling times inside the territorial US where it's more cost effective to fix this stuff than in the Nordic countries.
Originally Posted by
Steve_Hun
AFAIK it is the local authorities / airport / whoever else feels like but the Americans, who cough up the money for the pre-clearance, so if you ask me, I don't see this happening anytime soon... Really surprised about ARN though, didn't think that they have "enough" US bound traffic, that would justify the pre-clearance.
When the US government tells the Swedish government to jump, the usual response is more akin to "how high?". After the current US President's two versions of the Executive Order ban, I doubt that Sweden's current government is all that eager to seal this facility at ARN anytime very soon.