I checked a bag (technically a box) in G for an international flight a few weeks ago. Although the flight had originally been scheduled to depart G3, by the time I was checking in the box it had changed to F13.
As luck would have it, the box had a GPS tracker in it. Based on the track, the bag was taken to a point half-way along the G pier (no track due to it being inside) before being taken by vehicle to the gate in F. I don't think you can really read anything into this - although it was due to depart from F at check-in I can see that they still may have been consolidating the bags in G, especially given that it was a wide-body so likely they were using LD's for the baggage and may have been filling them in G.
Originally Posted by
Kacee
Very interesting, but begs the question, "why does it always take at least 30 minutes for bags following an SFO international arrival?"
Interestingly the
SFO flight tracker now includes first/last bag times - which really just goes to show how bad the problem is - at time! At other times, the numbers are pretty good! Unfortunately they only show arrivals for the past 4 hours (why, SFO? Why?).
The first few listed today are :
Most of which aren't bad (keep in mind immigration/customs don't open until 6am, so the two pre-6am arrivals will have had to wait until then), however there are clear exceptions. UA872/TPE apparently arrived at 6:47 according to United (almost 20 mins later than listed here), but 1st bags weren't until 7:35am which is almost 50 minutes later!
What this doesn't show is where the delay is happening. As I understand it, many/all of these bags go through CBP inspection before making it to the belt now days. It's possible that they are putting more focus on specific flights/countries which is slowing those down?