This past Monday, I took Delta from JFK to Brussels. Arrived at the gate at 18:10 for a 19:00 departure. It was my first experience with shuttle bus-type vehicles transfering passengers directly from the gate to the airplane door.

(For those not familiar - and I definitely was not familiar until I actually went through the process - a "bus" elevates itself to gate level, and passengers board through the normal terminal gate. When the bus is full, it descends to ground (runway) level, and shuttles to the plane, where it elevates again to airplane door level and the passengers board the plane directly from the "bus.")

Boarding the bus began at 18:20 and we did not proceed to the plane until almost 19:00. There was no methodology to loading the bus; zone numbers on our tickets were ignored. Likewise, when we got to the plane, the loading/sitting process was long and painful, since there was no order to the process. I was flying BC, and received no preference in the boarding process.

Ultimately, we did not push back until 19:40 (40 minutes late) and we took off at 20:00 or so.

I normally fly from Newark, so I am unfamiliar with JFK's processes. Is this common to the whole airport, or only Terminal 3 (and/or only to certain airlines)? I only took this flight (instead of my usual Continental EWR-BRU run) because I got a good deal on the BC ticket. On a happier note, we departed Brussels yesterday from gate B7 back to the States. This was the first time (in 4 years of travel to Brussels) that I did not depart from the very end of the terminal, which also has/had its own additional VERY thorough screening procedure for all passengers. As far as I could tell, this was only for the few US-bound flights. Gate B7 was a very short hop from security and the lounge.