You Thought it was United!

Standing on the escalator going down to the baggage claim, an overweight lady in her thirties makes her point as she is lowered out of sight, “Yeah, United, you thought it was United, but it’s not really United, actually, you have no idea who it is…”

It’s 12:30 in the morning, and I am waiting for a flight from Dallas with a over an hour of delay, sitting in an uncomfortable swivel chair in the only airport I’ve visited with free wireless Internet access. (Thank you Tampa Airport!)

Having spent the last half hour dredging up every last little bit of unfinished e-mail work, and avoiding all the things I am too tired to do (such as my accounting), I look around blearily to behold the monotonous gyration of the few other somnambulists with whom I am sharing this little taste of purgatory. The faint smell of jet fuel common to all airports blends with the musty smell all carpet acquires in Floridian Summer, but I am almost numb to it now.

I see an elderly lady sitting at the table next to mine turn slightly and scan the room. When my gaze meets hers I try a half-hearted smile but she quickly looks away; I must be having a bad hair day. Her husband ambles back and they sit over Starbucks and stare off towards the arrivals monitors in the distance.

Oh, some motion at last! Shuttle doors open off to my right and a slow-moving stream of people funnels through the waiting room and down the escalator, some talking quietly, others looking dazed but half glad it’s almost over. I think there must be at least one tourist in the bunch who has never been here in summer and wonder how long it will take them to grow gills and adjust. A poorly recorded female voice on the loudspeaker announces yet again that, yes, Tampa airport does have free internet access…

Not the flight I’m waiting for, though. That one won’t be in until after 1.

I try to imagine what it’s really like for the current system of traffic control and airport logistics across the world. Remember that ’90s movie Pushing Tin, with John Cusack? Lots more people are traveling now, with not a whole lot of facilities upgrades to cater to the increased flow. It seems air travel never really goes to sleep any more, and it’s decidedly hectic at times – take the Jet Blue terminal in JFK on a Friday afternoon. Delays guaranteed.

I may not know what the scoop is on air traffic control over the continental US, but I can tell you with all likelihood of accuracy that the average passenger feels more and more like a herd animal shuffling in endless queues which snake back on themselves like intestines, shunted through endless lines and examined, checked, verified and stamped onward every step of the way. Taking an international flight is even worse, akin to being digested by some enormous, uncaring colossus to then be unceremoniously ejected out the other end following endless hours of limbo.

There is some small glimmer of hope out there,though. Real humans still come to work every day in these airport twilight zones, and more of them care than is at first realized.

A couple months back I was on my way to Florida from my home town of Lugano, Switzerland; spending the week-end with some friends in New York. My American Airlines flight out of JFK was scheduled for departure just after 3, so I figured taking the metro from Upper West at 11:30 gave me not plenty, but just enough time. Wrong – I’d forgotten that there’s track repairs going on throughout the A line on Sundays, and it took me two hours to get to the airport. With my flight still departing in more than 30 minutes, but past the check-in cut-off, I was unceremoniously informed that there was no way I could check in, no way I could make it on the flight, that it was the last flight, that nothing cold be done, and that (of course!) I should see someone else somewhere else if I disagreed.

That someone else told me there was only one flight to Tampa via Chicago, and another flight to Miami for that day, and sorry, both of them cost over $500 to book. That was a rough moment – after all, I’ve gone back to school now and my demographic isn’t known for high-flying financial success anyhow. To top it all off, I had the first classes of my summer semester starting the next day.

It looked hopeless, until I finally spoke to something like the manager of the supervisor’s superior. Now there was a swell guy, who invested two seconds (literally) of his time and made me feel a valued customer. There was another unused ticked: a flight I had missed the month before (which of course, at the time, could not be changed) when I stayed in Florida a couple weeks longer than expected, and that plus the flight I had just missed meant I could do the O’Hare-Tampa hop for free. I did get home at something like 1:30am, but at least I got to college on time the next day.

All that to illustrate the need for change. There are some fancy terminals all throughout the world, architectural marvels monument to the significance of the advances we made to reach our current status. After all, it’s not around the world in 80 days anymore, it’s a lot less than 80 hours. As a race, it’s a grandiose achievement. Now, if it were only possible to try and camouflage that feeling of going through a hamburger machine…

On the other hand, it just may be that the age of flight is on the way out. There’s talk of vacuum-pressure tunnels tethered to the ocean floor with trains inside doing New York – London in a couple hours, and the amount of high-speed train development and investment going on in Europe is simply staggering. Maybe in 50 years we’ll be back to traveling on trains, except these ones will likely be trailing a sonic boom. Who knows?