Originally Posted by
aerosly
Yeah, I had just gone through customs the day before, and it took more than an hour for me. I think this was the result of introducing new automated checkpoints that were incredibly slow for some reason; whatever the reason, I wasn't surprised at how long it took. On board, I was in 1A close to the FAs, and overheard them talking about it; apparently they had some fruit and stuff for lunch that customs confiscated, so they must have gotten pulled off for hassling.. err.. additional inspection.
Thanks for sharing such a positive (all things considered) experience.
Anecdotally, coming from past work at another airline, aircraft and crew swaps have recently been challenging in Mexico. To be fair, the US forces crews from Mexico (and all other countries) to come off the plane regardless in the US and clear customs/immigration and then reboard, even the same airplane back to Mexico on a 1 hour turn. One of the stations I managed, we handled AeroMexico's ramp and every day customer service would send a Supervisor with the crew to try and expedite them through US CBP and escort back through TSA to the airplane. Usually meant boarding was a rushed affair, or CBP would staff just one officer to process crew and they'd get stuck behind, say, a whole A380 crew that was spending the next 2 days there on layover, when they had a flight back to MEX leaving in 40 minutes.