
Airports make the indignities inherent to air travel cohere with its fantasies - Thevet
http://reallifemag.com/ground-control/
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deepspace
1\. "Christopher Schaberg is an associate professor of English at Loyola
University New Orleans, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2011)
and The End of Airports (2015). His next book, Airportness, will be published
by Bloomsbury in fall 2017." \-- Airport fetish much?

2\. This drivel reads like an essay by a struggling humanities undergraduate.
The whole piece could be replaced by two words, "airports suck", with no loss
of information.

~~~
codyb
The "Siri which planes are above me" made the journey worth it for me. Really
pretty neat.

~~~
mrfusion
That doesn't work for me. It just brings up a web search.

~~~
throwanem
It should produce Wolfram Alpha results.

~~~
mrfusion
It's not

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AgentME
Am I the only one that likes airports? (Well, besides the annoying security
theater.) Once you're in, you've got no other responsibilities besides showing
up at a door at a specific time. You can't feel bad for not doing those other
things you know you probably should be eventually doing, because you're busy
in an airport! It's the one place I won't have any doubts at all about the way
I'm spending my time when I sit around and read.

... Reading my post and considering my apparently-unique love for airports
makes me wonder if I have some kind of anxiety issue.

~~~
yodsanklai
I like them too for the same reasons (after I passed all the controls). And as
a frequent flyer, I like to congratulate myself over my well-optimized
routine!

~~~
Hydraulix989
Sitting on the plane sucks though if you're not first class.

I'm 6 feet tall and the lack of legroom and claustrophobia is tough to deal
with, especially if the person in front of me inconsiderably leans their seat
back.

The last three flights I was on had us sitting on the tarmac 40 minutes each
time before take-off due to various maintenance/ATC issues. Of course, you
couldn't open your laptop either (but I did anyway).

The flight attendants also have a habit of asking me to close my laptop when
it isn't anywhere near time to land yet.

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cafard
It struck me when I was traveling a lot for work that airports were not
entirely unlike the debtors' prisons in Dickens: you couldn't wholly disclaim
responsibility for being there, but the discomfort seemed out of proportion to
the fault; and you could get some of the comforts of life, but at exorbitant
prices.

------
nickff
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced
the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.”

― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

~~~
teraflop
Or how about this, from the introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin's collection
_Changing Planes_ :

> If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse,
> short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But
> what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight,
> or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the
> connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for
> a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the
> National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your
> airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there
> are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the
> plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any
> circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time)
> why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in
> airports, not going anywhere?

> In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel,
> not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The
> airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does
> not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end.
> The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval
> between planes.

~~~
beamatronic
Jesus, that's depressing. For me, the airport is a place that's always buzzing
with human activity. The atmosphere is electric. Here, you find people from
all walks of live, traveling for all sorts of reasons. Work. Family. Love.
War. Weddings. Funerals. It's a goal-oriented sort of place, everyone has
somewhere to be and a task to perform. There's common interest, we want to get
to our destination safely. There are delights for the weary traveler - coffee,
shops to browse in - Take the time to treat yourself! You're _travelling_.

~~~
sixo
But the coffee's bad, the shops, wifi, food, and drinks are overpriced and
lack variety, the piano is off-limits, and nobody's rooted here long enough to
invest energy in it as a place for community. What you describe would be great
if it was good, but it's bad.

~~~
geon
There are never any electric sockets either, so you can't use your screens for
very long.

~~~
ChoHag
Some airports are relenting, but you must stand.

------
paulsutter
I was hoping this was about how airports /should/ work. The current system
can't possibly be ideal.

Airports seem to be built with no concept of door to door travel time. For
sample, SF to LA by plane. Use muni to get to BART, wait for BART, take it to
the little airport train thing, then a line at checkin, security, and all the
long walks in between.

Overnight self-driving sleeper Uber will be a vastly superior experience. It's
a sign of how we're moving backwards despite all the technology.

~~~
fit2rule
European airports can be extraordinarily well connected. (Most of the German
ones, for example, are connected directly to local rail lines, which are
another thing entirely.)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
London as well: Heathrow is directly connected to the tube (subway) and
Gatwick is directly connected to local rail. With only hand luggage and a
scannable passport, it takes about 50 min. from getting of the plane at
Gatwick until you're in the middle of the city.

~~~
Symbiote
Should you ever be delayed at Gatwick, with pleasant weather, there's a public
footpath that leads away from the airport along the river. It's amazing how
quickly the airport disappears from view.

I spent some of a 4 hour delay walking this path.

The blue dotted line, go north then along the river:
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.1581/-0.1632](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.1581/-0.1632)

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mmanfrin
I kinda like Airports -- mainly because I can have a beer at 10am.

~~~
jmspring
Depending where in the world you are, there are bars open at 10am (at least in
the US). Beer at 10am, in a family situation, for me while in Germany (inlaws
house) took me aback. But I don't have a problem doing so at an airport.

~~~
jdale27
Right. It's not that beer is _available_ at 10am -- obviously you can walk
into any corner liquor store in the US at 10am, buy a beer, and drink it from
a can hidden in a paper bag like your fellow sidewalk winos -- it's the fact
that drinking at 10am in an airport is apparently perfectly respectable
behavior, even for the most professional of travelers. Another facet of
"airportness".

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flightspeak
Thanks for the forward @jkuria!

Hi all, Agreed - from our vantage perspective, a majority of US airports still
have a long way to go before they match best-in-class industry standards.
We’ve been privileged to see (and contribute to) improvements across planning,
traveler engagement, terminal design (cool stuff happening here) and much
more. US airport leaders like PDX and CVG (recognized by travelers and Skytrax
awards) are contributing to best practices that are slowly but widely being
adopted.

From a personal perspective (as the founder of flightSpeak), I’m more
optimistic about airports b/c of the human element that is largely untapped.
The noise of wait times and lack of information has drowned out the
fascination of discovery at airports, which we’re working on changing.

If you’d like to find out more of what your local airport is doing, do a
search for “<IATA> master plan” You’ll be surprised there’s a ton you can also
contribute to as a traveler and resident (if you’re in the area of the
airport).

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mc32
Winogrand's "Arrivals and Departures"[1] adds a different dimension --I guess
it's reminiscent of the "jet-age" optimism.

[1][https://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/airport](https://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/airport)

