8 ms·

Airports make the indignities inherent to air travel cohere with its fantasies

48 points by Thevet 10y ago

nickff 10y ago
“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 10y ago
  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.
  - Waterluvian 10y ago
    It's why I drive if it's ever one day away. It ends up being hours longer, but I get an adventure, not a migraine. It's time well spent.
    - JadeNB 10y ago
      Try taking the train, if you can spare the time! If it goes from near where you are to near where you want to go, it can be great. If it's a trip of less than a day, then you'll wind up where you want to go feeling much more rested and much less stressed. (If it's more than a day, then you'll have to face the question of whether you want to sleep awkwardly in coach or pony up big bucks for a sleeper; but you can get used to sleeping awkwardly in coach—for me, it's much more comfortable than sleeping on a plane.)
      - msandford 10y ago
        Also remember that "coach" on a train is at least as comfortable as first class on an airplane. Especially if you're over around 6' tall.
      - forkandwait 10y ago
        In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.
        JadeNB 10y ago
        > In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive … This is mostly true, but: 1. "Frequent traveller" programs can take some of the pain out of the price, just as they can for flying; and, as msandford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241) points out, it's not entirely unreasonable, if you're optimising for comfort (since it's not for speed!), to compare the price of a coach seat on a train with the price of a business-class seat on a plane. 2. Short-haul trains will usually beat any possible flight; and even relatively long-haul trains can be competitive—an upcoming trip from Michigan to Maryland for my brother's wedding is $81 one way. > … and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains. This is also true, but, I think, misleading; it's not as if planes always run on time. At least, when the train is stuck, you're on the train, which is nice and comfy, rather than in the airport, which is miserable! I have also never been bumped from a train due to overbooking, and once had a lovely train ride that simply plowed through snow falling thickly enough that most flights were grounded.
  - pklausler 10y ago
    And this was written by somebody who has PDX as her home airport, which is actually a pretty nice, comfortable, and friendly place to hang out.
    - vvanders 10y ago
      Yup, PDX is by far my favorite airport on the west coast. I've yet to see another parking lot as neat as PDX. There's an ultrasonic sensor above each spot with a red/green LED that shows if the spot is open(green for clear). Makes it incredibly easy to find out if there's an open spot down a parking lane.
      - hueving 10y ago
        The thing that's interesting about airports is how diverse the criteria is for people critiquing them. Take the parking you highlighted for example, unless someone is ranking it as a home airport AND they don't take uber/lyft to get there, it's completely irrelevant. I tend to enjoy layovers in LAX because I like their sky club, which is completely irrelevant to anyone not flying sky team.
        Hydraulix989 10y ago
        I really like JFK's roof-top lounge that you can go up onto if you're flying JetBlue. It has grass, umbrellas, and shade outside (INSIDE the airport terminal/gates -- surprised they have it given security concerns).
        oldmanjay 10y ago
        What security concerns do you see being outside in a secured area? People flying guns in with drones is about all that comes to mind.
  - beamatronic 10y ago
    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.
    - SixSigma 10y ago
      Next time I have a 12 hour stop-over in an airport that's mostly closed I'll remember how much I should be enjoying myself - I'm travelling.
    - Kurimo 10y ago
      Those delights are so overpriced as to be insulting. Really hard to enjoy some scrambled eggs when they cost $13.
      - ChoHag 10y ago
        And taste of nothing more then exactly as much salt as it is topped with, without even the benefit of a crunch of the slice of toast which is unable to hold its own under the onslaught of up-bulking water released during the cooking^Wboiling process (and wouldn't be able to even without the water because modern bread is so laughably unbreadlike). I'm happy to pay for food. I like paying for food. I like it to be food.
    - sixo 10y ago
      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.
      - Hydraulix989 10y ago
  - GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
    What is with authors and melodrama about common everyday things?
- eric_the_read 10y ago
  I really like MSP. I haven't been through there in a long time, but I remember it being pleasantly decorated, none of the gates were too terribly far away (looking at you, DFW), and it was overall relatively quiet compared to DEN.
- flopp 10y ago
  Airports are actually pretty nice, when looking at them from above. The way their geometries are embedded into different landscapes is sometimes quite intriguing. See https://airports.flopp.net/ https://airports.flopp.net/ for some random examples.
- simonsarris 10y ago
  I think a lot of them are beautiful and comforting and enjoy my time spent in them, for the most part. https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYx6zUMmFj/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYx6zUMmFj/ There's so much I like about the atmosphere. There's this sleepy peacefulness mixed with hurrying productivity that I love to watch. Stretches of quietness give way to an abundance of people, some happy, some professional, some weary, or a mix of all three in the families jostling about. Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds. Your phone doesn't work so you read your book non-stop. You get an accidental chance to remember what bad coffee is like. Dim expectations of plans (or longings for home) percolate all the while. Maybe not perfectly pretty, conventionally, but if I had to pick a term "Airport Aesthetic" rings pretty true to me.
  - delvr 10y ago
    Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds. This is the closest I've found: http://tabletopaudio.com/ http://tabletopaudio.com/ track "Dome City Center"; give it a try. (Direct link: http://tabletopaudio.com/download.php?downld_file=43_Dome_City_Center.mp3 http://tabletopaudio.com/download.php?downld_file=43_Dome_Ci...)
- wangchow 10y ago
  Is there any transportation hub that can be categorized as pretty? Bus stations, train stations, whatever else has too much hustle-and-bustle to be categorized as pretty.
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    There were some really magnificent train stations back in Victorian times...
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      And early 20th Century in the US.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Baltimore Penn is a great example: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/7a/df/4c/7adf4cd6db221dd684a0999231842f8f.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/7a/df/4c/7adf... Old enough to have real character, and nobody seems terribly inclined to gut it and fill it up with soulless blondwood veneer. I've never seen it much more active than in the photo, either. Really, a significant part of the reason why I prefer train travel to flying is because when I choose the former, I have the privilege of leaving from and returning to Penn, rather than the modernist Skinner-box nightmare that is BWI.
      - clock_tower 10y ago
        Indeed! I wasn't intending to limit good train stations to Britain when I spoke of Victorian times -- and, indeed, "Victorian" is too limiting. Early-20thC is Edwardian or thereabouts -- and US train-station design was at its zenith at that time, as throwanem observes.
    - wangchow 10y ago
      Architecturally for sure. But, the true feeling of any transportation hub includes the people buzzing through. At least modern-day ones :) I'm sure things were much slower paced back then however. Perhaps it was an entirely different experience!
- dghf 10y ago
  Kuala Lumpur was pretty nice, if I remember correctly.
  - colmvp 10y ago
    They've got a forest in the middle of the airport, and eateries that are certainly better than most North American airports.
mmanfrin 10y ago
I kinda like Airports -- mainly because I can have a beer at 10am.
- jmspring 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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".
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Elsewhere in the thread someone was complaining about LaGuardia airport because there's no direct rail connection. There's also parts of it that have absolutely no bars, making it officially the worst airport in America.
paulsutter 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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
  - GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
    Newark is terrible, but at least it's connected directly to NJTransit rail.
- tajen 10y ago
  > no concept of door to door travel time Yup, we should have a luggage drop wagon on board of the BART, and the BART should drop us at our gate. Obviously that implies the BART is also a giant TSA irradiation oven (Want to opt out? Well, there's the taxi).
deepspace 10y ago
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 10y ago
  The "Siri which planes are above me" made the journey worth it for me. Really pretty neat.
  - jasode 10y ago
    That particular question seems to resonate because it was also mentioned in 2014 NYT article about a mother's autistic son and his relationship with Siri: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-be...
  - mrfusion 10y ago
    That doesn't work for me. It just brings up a web search.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      It should produce Wolfram Alpha results.
      - mrfusion 10y ago
        It's not
- thesmallestcat 10y ago
  Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Which promises a profitable day, as far as HN karma is concerned.
mc32 10y ago
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
cafard 10y ago
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.
AgentME 10y ago
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.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > ... Reading my post and considering my apparently-unique love for airports makes me wonder if I have some kind of anxiety issue. Yeah. This seems more like a reason for you to reflect and relax. I've got anxiety issues of my own, but they tend to surface at the airport. Waiting at the gate is a perfect time to go through my mental checklist of what I packed, and await the realization that I've forgotten something critical (deodorant? socks? laptop adapter? to book a hotel?) or to look forward to everything that can go wrong during the trip (that airplane looks pretty old. Will I have time to visit with everyone I want to? Will I have to visit people I don't want to see? Will I get downtime to myself? What if I get sick while I'm there? What if I get sick right before I'm leaving?)
- yodsanklai 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
flightspeak 10y ago
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).

48 points by Thevet 10y ago

“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 10y ago
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.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  It's why I drive if it's ever one day away. It ends up being hours longer, but I get an adventure, not a migraine. It's time well spent.
  - JadeNB 10y ago
    Try taking the train, if you can spare the time! If it goes from near where you are to near where you want to go, it can be great. If it's a trip of less than a day, then you'll wind up where you want to go feeling much more rested and much less stressed. (If it's more than a day, then you'll have to face the question of whether you want to sleep awkwardly in coach or pony up big bucks for a sleeper; but you can get used to sleeping awkwardly in coach—for me, it's much more comfortable than sleeping on a plane.)
    - msandford 10y ago
      Also remember that "coach" on a train is at least as comfortable as first class on an airplane. Especially if you're over around 6' tall.
    - forkandwait 10y ago
      In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.
      - JadeNB 10y ago
        > In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive … This is mostly true, but: 1. "Frequent traveller" programs can take some of the pain out of the price, just as they can for flying; and, as msandford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241) points out, it's not entirely unreasonable, if you're optimising for comfort (since it's not for speed!), to compare the price of a coach seat on a train with the price of a business-class seat on a plane. 2. Short-haul trains will usually beat any possible flight; and even relatively long-haul trains can be competitive—an upcoming trip from Michigan to Maryland for my brother's wedding is $81 one way. > … and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains. This is also true, but, I think, misleading; it's not as if planes always run on time. At least, when the train is stuck, you're on the train, which is nice and comfy, rather than in the airport, which is miserable! I have also never been bumped from a train due to overbooking, and once had a lovely train ride that simply plowed through snow falling thickly enough that most flights were grounded.
- pklausler 10y ago
  And this was written by somebody who has PDX as her home airport, which is actually a pretty nice, comfortable, and friendly place to hang out.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Yup, PDX is by far my favorite airport on the west coast. I've yet to see another parking lot as neat as PDX. There's an ultrasonic sensor above each spot with a red/green LED that shows if the spot is open(green for clear). Makes it incredibly easy to find out if there's an open spot down a parking lane.
    - hueving 10y ago
      The thing that's interesting about airports is how diverse the criteria is for people critiquing them. Take the parking you highlighted for example, unless someone is ranking it as a home airport AND they don't take uber/lyft to get there, it's completely irrelevant. I tend to enjoy layovers in LAX because I like their sky club, which is completely irrelevant to anyone not flying sky team.
      - Hydraulix989 10y ago
        I really like JFK's roof-top lounge that you can go up onto if you're flying JetBlue. It has grass, umbrellas, and shade outside (INSIDE the airport terminal/gates -- surprised they have it given security concerns).
        oldmanjay 10y ago
        What security concerns do you see being outside in a secured area? People flying guns in with drones is about all that comes to mind.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  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.
  - SixSigma 10y ago
    Next time I have a 12 hour stop-over in an airport that's mostly closed I'll remember how much I should be enjoying myself - I'm travelling.
  - Kurimo 10y ago
    Those delights are so overpriced as to be insulting. Really hard to enjoy some scrambled eggs when they cost $13.
    - ChoHag 10y ago
      And taste of nothing more then exactly as much salt as it is topped with, without even the benefit of a crunch of the slice of toast which is unable to hold its own under the onslaught of up-bulking water released during the cooking^Wboiling process (and wouldn't be able to even without the water because modern bread is so laughably unbreadlike). I'm happy to pay for food. I like paying for food. I like it to be food.
  - sixo 10y ago
    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.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
- GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
  What is with authors and melodrama about common everyday things?
eric_the_read 10y ago
I really like MSP. I haven't been through there in a long time, but I remember it being pleasantly decorated, none of the gates were too terribly far away (looking at you, DFW), and it was overall relatively quiet compared to DEN.
flopp 10y ago
Airports are actually pretty nice, when looking at them from above. The way their geometries are embedded into different landscapes is sometimes quite intriguing. See https://airports.flopp.net/ https://airports.flopp.net/ for some random examples.
simonsarris 10y ago
I think a lot of them are beautiful and comforting and enjoy my time spent in them, for the most part. https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYx6zUMmFj/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYx6zUMmFj/ There's so much I like about the atmosphere. There's this sleepy peacefulness mixed with hurrying productivity that I love to watch. Stretches of quietness give way to an abundance of people, some happy, some professional, some weary, or a mix of all three in the families jostling about. Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds. Your phone doesn't work so you read your book non-stop. You get an accidental chance to remember what bad coffee is like. Dim expectations of plans (or longings for home) percolate all the while. Maybe not perfectly pretty, conventionally, but if I had to pick a term "Airport Aesthetic" rings pretty true to me.
- delvr 10y ago
  Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds. This is the closest I've found: http://tabletopaudio.com/ http://tabletopaudio.com/ track "Dome City Center"; give it a try. (Direct link: http://tabletopaudio.com/download.php?downld_file=43_Dome_City_Center.mp3 http://tabletopaudio.com/download.php?downld_file=43_Dome_Ci...)
wangchow 10y ago
Is there any transportation hub that can be categorized as pretty? Bus stations, train stations, whatever else has too much hustle-and-bustle to be categorized as pretty.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  There were some really magnificent train stations back in Victorian times...
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    And early 20th Century in the US.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Baltimore Penn is a great example: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/7a/df/4c/7adf4cd6db221dd684a0999231842f8f.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/7a/df/4c/7adf... Old enough to have real character, and nobody seems terribly inclined to gut it and fill it up with soulless blondwood veneer. I've never seen it much more active than in the photo, either. Really, a significant part of the reason why I prefer train travel to flying is because when I choose the former, I have the privilege of leaving from and returning to Penn, rather than the modernist Skinner-box nightmare that is BWI.
    - clock_tower 10y ago
      Indeed! I wasn't intending to limit good train stations to Britain when I spoke of Victorian times -- and, indeed, "Victorian" is too limiting. Early-20thC is Edwardian or thereabouts -- and US train-station design was at its zenith at that time, as throwanem observes.
  - wangchow 10y ago
    Architecturally for sure. But, the true feeling of any transportation hub includes the people buzzing through. At least modern-day ones :) I'm sure things were much slower paced back then however. Perhaps it was an entirely different experience!
dghf 10y ago
Kuala Lumpur was pretty nice, if I remember correctly.
- colmvp 10y ago
  They've got a forest in the middle of the airport, and eateries that are certainly better than most North American airports.

mmanfrin 10y ago

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

jmspring 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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".
pavel_lishin 10y ago
Elsewhere in the thread someone was complaining about LaGuardia airport because there's no direct rail connection. There's also parts of it that have absolutely no bars, making it officially the worst airport in America.

paulsutter 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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
- GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
  Newark is terrible, but at least it's connected directly to NJTransit rail.
tajen 10y ago
> no concept of door to door travel time Yup, we should have a luggage drop wagon on board of the BART, and the BART should drop us at our gate. Obviously that implies the BART is also a giant TSA irradiation oven (Want to opt out? Well, there's the taxi).

deepspace 10y ago

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 10y ago
The "Siri which planes are above me" made the journey worth it for me. Really pretty neat.
- jasode 10y ago
  That particular question seems to resonate because it was also mentioned in 2014 NYT article about a mother's autistic son and his relationship with Siri: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-be...
- mrfusion 10y ago
  That doesn't work for me. It just brings up a web search.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    It should produce Wolfram Alpha results.
    - mrfusion 10y ago
      It's not
thesmallestcat 10y ago
Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Which promises a profitable day, as far as HN karma is concerned.

mc32 10y ago

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

cafard 10y ago

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.

AgentME 10y ago

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.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> ... Reading my post and considering my apparently-unique love for airports makes me wonder if I have some kind of anxiety issue. Yeah. This seems more like a reason for you to reflect and relax. I've got anxiety issues of my own, but they tend to surface at the airport. Waiting at the gate is a perfect time to go through my mental checklist of what I packed, and await the realization that I've forgotten something critical (deodorant? socks? laptop adapter? to book a hotel?) or to look forward to everything that can go wrong during the trip (that airplane looks pretty old. Will I have time to visit with everyone I want to? Will I have to visit people I don't want to see? Will I get downtime to myself? What if I get sick while I'm there? What if I get sick right before I'm leaving?)
yodsanklai 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

flightspeak 10y ago

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).