On Air Travel

I haven't been yakking nearly as much as I want to because of school. I've decided to adapt (read: shamelessly recycle and partially censor) an essay I had to write earlier this week and share it with all one of you. All censorship has been bolded. Fill it in with the madlib of your choice. -James

Airports, as Douglas Adams once (in a book I read mostly in various airports, subsequently loaned to a friend, and haven’t seen in three years) put it much better than I can ever hope to, are generally ugly things. They really don’t want you to spend much time in them; get on your flight as quickly as possible, so that an arriving plane can then use that gate. You’d think the airlines would be a bit more cooperative, but no: delays and cancellations are still alarmingly commonplace. Once you’re through the security checkpoint and find out that your flight has been delayed, there are only so many options available to you.

What is an airport? A portmanteau of the word “air” and “port,” I suppose, much like seaport before it; a place where one gets on or off a vessel traveling through the air. It’s a far more accurate term for the age of zeppelins, but that’s the resiliency of the English language for you. Airports have basic features. There’s a check-in counter where you tell the agent who you are and they give you a ticket if you’ve bought one in advance. This process is being phased out, replaced by computers that spit out either your ticket or error messages telling you to go see the very gate agent whose job has been threatened by this new computer. If you haven’t bought a ticket in advance, you tell the agent where you want to go and the agent prints off a ticket after taking your money (I don’t believe the computers can do this yet; they can print tickets and take your money, to be sure, but they can’t seem to plan your route for you). If you’re carrying more than two bags, you’ll have to leave some of them with the agent, who will ensure that the bags get loaded onto the plane. And by that I mean the agent will put your bag on a conveyor belt and you’ll be happy if it lands where you’re going on the same day you do. There was an Italian airport I got stuck in at one point some years ago because the carrier cancelled our flight after taking our bags and refusing to give them back. They gave us accommodations for the night – an awful Italian hotel in the middle of a full-scale soccer riot with a thermostat even more uncooperative than the ones in my college’s dorms. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s a fantastically bad idea to check a bag.

After that, you go to the security checkpoint, which on average consists of fifteen minutes of standing in line, two minutes of hastily dragging your computer out of its bag and removing your shoes and belt and “any metallic objects you might be carrying,” five seconds of nervous anticipation as you step through the metal detector (now being replaced by what a friend of mine refers to as a “nudie scanner”), another minute of waiting for the guy behind the x-ray machine to stop staring at your bag – or worse, the bag right behind yours – so you can retrieve it, and one last minute of re-tying your shoelaces (I’ve since discovered the joys of loafers) and putting your keys back in your pocket and your computer back in your bag before you can be on your way.

It is vitally important to step into the scanner the moment your bags go into the x-ray machine. Usually one scanner will service two lines, and it’s entirely possible for well-coordinated thieves to rob you at the security checkpoint; one of them will wait for you to put your bags on the belt before entering the scanner. They’ll have lots of metallic objects in their pockets and set the thing off. While you’re waiting for them to empty their pockets, their accomplice will make off with your bags on the other side. This scam may not continue to work with the advent of the nudie scanners, and that’s the only good thing I can say about them. At any rate, once you’re past security, it’s invariably at least an hour until your flight, and you have no distractions except what the airport has to offer.

Before I get to what the airport has to offer (spoiler alert: very little), a word on the ideal dress code for travelers; unless it’s the middle of winter, my advice is a polo shirt, khakis, loafers, and a sweater you can stick in your bag as soon as you get on the plane (for men; I’m unqualified to give fashion advice to women). I’ve already mentioned that the loafers will save you time at security. Khaki pants have deeper pockets than jeans, so if you’re not wearing a sport coat with deep pockets, you’ll have somewhere to put your ticket without folding it up. Airports and airplanes tend to be clean enough that you shouldn’t worry about getting some fairly nice clothes dirty, but I wouldn’t advise wearing a suit unless you’re on your way to a meeting.

The airport I’ve spent the most time in, by virtue of having parents who like scheduling flights into and out of it, is Chicago’s own O’Hare International Airport, named after a World War Two pilot who got shot down after taking out five German stukas. Before that, the airport was called Orchard Field, and the luggage tags still read ORD. The airport is named after a guy whose plane went down. To me, that seems like tempting fate. O’Hare has got some of the best distractions in the airport business, including a Brachiosaur fossil they had to take out of the Field Museum of Natural History to make room for Sue the T-rex. Unfortunately, they put the skeleton directly behind the security checkpoint, which is an awful place for a decoration that old; people are eager to put their shoes back on and bustle off to their gates, not look up at the remains of the ancient beast.

There’s an impressive light show above the moving walkways used to ferry passengers underneath the tarmac to another terminal. In fact, somewhat appropriately, O’Hare’s entire theme when it comes to décor appears to be “look up!” There’s not another airport I can name that actually puts interesting displays on or near its ceiling. Elsewhere in the airport, you can find a massive globe suspended in the air (it gets decorated with a wreath when Christmas comes around), and a corridor with ceiling tiles that slowly go through the entire rainbow as you get further away from the security checkpoint. I wonder why the airport was built with ceiling heights more appropriate for a cathedral. Again, a general “look up” theme appears to be the answer. The airport is large enough that it took several trips for me to deem it sufficiently explored.

Airport food is uniformly miserable. They have McDonald’s and the like, and they also have more formal restaurants, but it could just be the stale air that makes everything taste like travel food, and that’s really no fun. The bottled water always tastes like tap water, whereas no-one will bat an eye if you fill up an empty water bottle using a drinking fountain. The Cyril E. King airport in island recently removed the drinking fountain inside their terminal and jacked up the price of bottled water; someone’s catching on. Also, it’s often difficult to find a spot to sit at any of these restaurants, because they’re all full of people who are, like you, waiting for their delayed flight to finally board.

Actually, compared to the alternative, waiting for a delayed flight isn’t all that bad. I was once on a trip from island to Chicago, with a layover in Orlando. The first leg of the flight got delayed; the plane that was supposed to take me from Orlando to Chicago was boarding at the same time that the plane taking me from island to Orlando was touching down. I ran, watching the gate numbers slowly march towards 35, my gate… except that I was suddenly looking at 34, 33, 32. My mind wasn’t exactly functioning, but that airport’s layout doesn’t seem particularly sensible either. I got as far as 28 before I realized that I’d made a mistake. There’s a dark and poorly-marked corridor leading to gates 35 and 36 that I completely missed. The map of the terminal that I’d studied before the first flight had landed displayed nothing like this. I can’t say that the airport in Orlando has particularly endeared itself to me. Nor have the people responsible for printing accurate diagrams of the airports in the back of the airline’s magazines. I did make that flight, but only just barely.

Getting to the gate has only been a problem for me only that once, and there were extenuating circumstances. Usually, the issue has nothing to do with me getting to the gate on time. Once I get to the gate, I routinely discover that the flight’s departure time has been pushed back fifteen minutes, then thirty minutes, then an hour. Joseph Daniel argues that these delays are due to airport congestion; there aren’t enough gates to accommodate the busy schedules of modern airlines. But this proposal is incomplete. Airport congestion has very little to do with delays caused by random equipment failure that the airline staff always seems to be completely incapable of fixing on their own.

One of the most idiotic situations I’ve ever found myself in involves United Airlines, or as I have taken to calling them, Blighted United. We were coming back from visiting a family member in some state on the East Coast, and our flight was delayed for an hour. Then it was cancelled. The reason for this cancellation? Some part of the plane we were to use had malfunctioned, and a replacement part would need to be flown in from San Francisco. This was United Airlines, a major travel industry, not some dime-store company that only owns twenty planes; was it unreasonable of me to expect them to have replacement parts less than five hours away? As it happened, a Southwest flight to Chicago was leaving from the gate across the aisle. We got the last seats. Congestion had nothing to do with this debacle.

More grating is the way United handled the crisis. By watching the gate agent carefully, my father was able to predict that the flight would be cancelled more than twenty minutes before it was officially announced. The agent was always either conversing with an engineer or calling his superiors. Said superiors naturally decided to take a “the buck stops over there” approach to solving the problem, and the agent began calling hotels, because that was the last flight of the evening and it is against United’s policy to re-book its passengers on other airlines. This guy knew, for a good twenty minutes, that our flight wasn’t going to leave and if his bosses had anything to say about it, we wouldn’t go anywhere that night. There were two flights to Chicago that started boarding in that first one-hour window; if he’d announced the flight was cancelled earlier, more people other than just the clever and observant ones could have gotten home that day. But no. This situation had nothing to do with any congestion anywhere down the line. Number-crunchers like Joseph Daniel fail to account for the general incompetence that can at times seem to pervade the airline industry. Instead, a simple JSTOR search of the terms “airport” and “waiting” reveal essay after essay discussing ways to relieve the bottleneck of passengers with pricing schemes and other and other options aimed at “fixing” the passengers, when in fact the airline is at fault.

That was an example of the rare occasion when I was able to follow the drama behind a flight delay. Most of the time, I, like all my fellow travelers, get left to my own devices. In the section on the security checkpoint I mentioned taking a laptop out of my bag, and indeed the archaic instrument on which I’m typing this essay has been my one constant companion on all my travels for the past eight years. My computer’s batteries stopped holding a charge in an airport. I turned it on and started working on an essay (this was back in high school; it is not my intention to imply that I’ve maintained the habit of doing any schoolwork on vacation, because this is supposed to be a nonfiction class). I’d made sure the charge was full before I left, but it was still only about five minutes before the computer informed me that it had about five minutes of battery life left, so maybe it would be a good idea to save my work and shut it down. Without a computer to sustain my nearly-ADD-like demands for constant entertainment, I found myself investigating the airport’s library. I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve bought in an airport bookstore and actually finished. Once that plane finally lands and I get home, the book gets buried. Nevertheless, when a flight gets delayed, the bookstore’s usually the first place I go. My philosophy is that anything’s better than just sitting around, staring at an ugly airport wall.

At one point when I was in grade school, my family took a trip down to island with a layover in other island, where we found that our flight to island was cancelled. We wound up splitting our party up and taking three separate planes for the last thirty minutes of the trip. The layover ended up being something like five hours. I was, thankfully, still in my Pokemon phase (I cannot believe I just wrote that), and so, with a copious supply of batteries and yet another virtual cave to navigate, I passed the time continually stumbling down the same dead-end corridors.

These days when my plane gets delayed, I find myself wandering down real-life dead end corridors instead of virtual ones (there are far fewer bats in real life). There’s usually something worth finding, somewhere. My sister now attends college in Tennessee, and when our flight back from there was delayed, I wandered around looking at all the guitars in display cases. They have an obsession with Telecasters and Les Pauls, which makes sense given the country music scene in Nashville. In Heathrow, London, undeniably the worst airport I’ve ever been in, wandering is the only option; rarely are there even seats at the gate. The American Airlines terminal at Bradley International in Connecticut is a horribly boring affair; the gates are all arrayed around a large square room just after security, so there’s nowhere to wander. The upside is that you can get a nice view of the airplanes out on the tarmac going about their business, which evidently involves anything except taking you home.

So other than play video games, read a book, or wander around, what options are available to the traveler with too much time on his or her hands? Sleep is always an option. Jet-lag can kill more vacation plans than anything else except sickness (and it does a very good job of exacerbating that). Yes, the chairs in the gates are incredibly uncomfortable, which does make sleeping difficult. Talking to random strangers is always an option. After all, if they’re on your flight then they’re putting up with the exact same nonsense as you are. Of course, they might just complain that they’re horribly bored and stuck in an airport for the next two hours.