I still haven’t seen the end of Invictus. I know how it ends, of course. South Africa wins the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) comes out onto the field in the Springboks’ green and gold uniform (a symbol of pride to the country’s whites and a symbol of oppression to the country’s blacks) and a nation is united. Well, the jury’s still out on the united part. But I haven’t seen the end of Invictus because my recent flights have been short. Since the majority of my flights are perhaps an hour long, this is how I watch my movies now. Now, I’m not just “going to Toronto” I’m “watching the last half of The Tooth Fairy” (don’t judge me).

Meaning that the way I prepare for a flight has changed. Why? I have a 10 year old. Any parent with a child knows what I mean. It means you watch way too many computer-generated movies in 3D and not enough of anything else. (OK, Invictus may fall into this and, say, Iron Man probably doesn’t) The airplane becomes my catch-up time. That used to mean reading. And it still does – an airplane is the only place I might be able to sit down and read a newspaper. But more and more often, it means movies and television. It’s on an airplane that I first get to watch the TV shows I hear people talking about. Same with movies (in a recent post I suggested movie theatres for airports as well). My flying schedule is the reason I can join in on water cooler talk. How odd is that?

Airplanes have long been content delivery systems. You may bring the content on board with you, and many people do, but on an airplane you can read a magazine, you can watch the IFE or listen to music, you can catch up on work ; you are absorbing content. Airlines that understand this keep their passengers informed and entertained. The flight itself is a service. You have to get from Point A to Point B. But what you do on that flight is something else. That’s why there are ads on the airplane (let’s face it, content isn’t free). We live our lives surrounded by the content of the world, by stories. When we say we are media saturated what we’re really talking about is how much bad content there is out there. If all the stories vying for our attention were good, we wouldn’t use words like “bombarded” or “saturated” to describe our world. An airplane is a relatively “quiet” space from which to filter what’s out there. Outside of flight attendant announcements, there’s really nothing to interrupt you.

I’m still thinking about my next flight, not in terms of why I have to take it, but because I’d like to see the crowd’s reaction when Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela walks onto the field in that Springboks track suit. My recent (short) flights thus have an odd sense of continuity to them. It’s like one long movie watching experience “interrupted” by work. Or real life. Or not flying. And it makes me want to fly again. Soon.

PHOTO: THOMAS HAWK

Here in Airworld, the "world is small" is such a hoary cliche that to even think it is embarrassing. And yet, the shutting down of European airspace because of  Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano (and let us all hope that the next newsworthy volcano is easier to pronounce), the largest and longest shutdown of airspace since 9/11, is a little reminder that even the hoariest of clichés are false. And lazy. Because if anything, the shutdown of trans-Atlantic travel has reminded us that Europe is an ocean away. And how much this world relies on its air network.

Within Europe itself, soccer teams lamented having to take buses or trains to their destinations. Suddenly, the continent itself, the world’s second smallest, didn’t seem so small anymore. Even heads of state could not attend the funeral of Poland’s president. Airworld, at least to and within Europe, was shut down. And that convenience we all take for granted was gone. And we had no control over it. How humbling.

And then there is the flip side of this: the proof of our incredible interconnectedness. The stories of Kenyan flower growers watching their business literally wilt and die as they awaited the all clear, of students slumming it in London and New York, of high powered business executives scrambling for hotels on either side of the Atlantic, of those passengers stuck at the airports because the hotels were full, sleeping on benches for days on end and “bathing” in public airport washrooms (though this experience seemed better at some airports than others). Of our own editor from enRoute magazine “stuck” in Paris (luckily, with a hotel room and on an expense account!) and discovering the city in an entirely new way. All examples of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, affected by the flight ban. We are a people on the move. At the mercy of a functioning airline industry. And Mother Nature.

As someone who flies often enough (and knowing many people who are in the air far more often than I), the quick jaunt over to Europe, the manner in which we regard a three hour flight as “commuting,” the ease with which we simply board planes to jet half way around the world, has given us a false sense of our own membership in the global citizenry. All it took? A volcano on an isolated island. Having a gas.

When you travel, you can’t ignore what’s going on in the airline industry. It affects you in a very basic way. As I write this, one airline is contemplating yet more fare hikes. Another drops first class. Pilots are on strike in Europe. And 2009 is announced as the “worst year ever” – it’s endless and it’s a lot of bad news. And let’s not whitewash things: the airline industry is facing difficult times. As are many industries and many people.

A few days ago, a friend posted a photo of her hotel room on Twitter. The view was spectacular: a vast beige tableau framed by a room that seemed to integrate itself perfectly with the natural world outside. And that was enough to make the doom and gloom vanish, for a little while at least. It was a reminder of what travel affords us, of its possibilities. And why we imbue certain business (like the airline industry) with qualities it does not even seek to possess. Airlines make us emotional on so many different levels. The industry itself ignores this fact at its peril. And so lately, with the economic turbulence rocking all fronts, the industry has looked to the bottom line at the expense of the emotional experience of travel itself – even while using that emotional tug in their marketing. That’s the disconnect right now but I’m almost certain this will right itself.

Being in the media myself, I know that bad news is big news. But good news? Well, that’s not news at all. I understand why, both as a writer and as an avid consumer of news. It’s just not as interesting. A quick look at what you’re watching on TV will confirm this.

In the next month, I’m flying at least once a week. Mostly for business. And the airports will not be full of grumps (except, perhaps, for LGA, but I don’t see how it’s possible to be cheerful there). Things will move along efficiently. More often than not, I’ll get to my destination on time. The service onboard will be friendly. I won’t have much to complain about. And so there will be no news of my travels. Someone will ask me how my trip went, and I’ll reply that it went fine. I almost never have anything exciting to report about a flight except if I see something especially fine on the in-flight entertainment (I discovered HBO’s Bored to Death on a recent flight and can’t stop telling people about it) or if I spill something on my pants. I tend to spill things.

I’m an optimist about the industry. I remain confident that the industry will continue and thrive again. Why? Because travel is in our nature, and tourism isn’t about to disappear. It’s going to boom again when the economy picks up. It always does. And as much as businesses are relying on video conferencing or even things like Second Life (!) for their meetings (yes, IBM uses Second Life to stage regular meetings with its far-flung workforce), the face-to-face meeting is not an extravagance: it’s a human necessity.

For travelers, it’s a good idea to remember that most of the time, the airline industry does exactly what it says it’s going to do: it gets you where you want to go. And it does it well.

I’m not going to write about Up in the Air. Enough has been written about how accurately it portrays the obsessions of the world’s frequent flyers: mileage runs, trying to eke out those last few miles to get more “status.” And enough, too, has been written about the inherent loneliness of business travel. (The book was written before social media were ubiquitous, back when business travel was even lonelier.)

At this writing I haven’t seen the movie yet — it’s on my holiday to-do list — but a part of me doesn’t want to watch it because of the loneliness that permeates the film. Yes, George Clooney’s character, a corporate terminator who travels the country firing people, is a metaphor for a lot of things, but his wanderlust and the pros and cons of that desire to travel constantly deserve some reflection on their own. There is a vast tribe of travelers out there who don’t quite ever feel at home unless they are “up in the air” — or at least in Airworld (a term that comes to us from, yes, Up in the Air by the great Walter Kirn). Look around you at the airport. Chat up the person next to you at the hotel bar. Take a gander at that guy doing an early morning workout at the hotel gym. They may not look like George Clooney, but they are the people he represents. If anything, the way we perceive his character may reveal our own collective bias toward seeing “domesticity” or “fixedness” as a positive thing.

Airworld isn’t inherently sad or happy — it just is, just as any place in the world is only a place before it takes on the characteristics of the people inhabiting it. I have written about the various communities that make up Airworld and about the charge I still feel when I’m in Airworld. To me, regardless of whether one sees it as a “sad” or “happy” place, Airworld is still enthralling, a place where the ideas of the world beg to be grabbed.

Airworld is where the world gets small. And “flat.” And where the world becomes something accessible and connected. It is, in many ways, a kind of medium — the power and immediacy of the internet and books and magazines and newspapers are writ in a 3D reality of real people talking about real ideas and traveling to real places. Tell me that’s not cool.
 

In Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure, author Alastair Gordon talks about the first time he visited JFK (then Idlewild) and the almost hallucinatory world inside the TWA terminal: “The air was charged with anticipation. Pilots stepped through pools of milky light… All I knew was that I didn’t want to leave just then. I wanted to savor the moment.”

In some ways, I’d like to savour the feeling that the young Alastair Gordon describes in that passage. (I recommend the book highly.) But I’ve travelled too often and too far to get palpably thrilled by an airport experience. Don’t get me wrong. Airports and even travel in general still excite me, but I don’t ever really feel awe anymore. Not by airports anyhow, and that saddens me.

I’d like to experience what my son feels whenever we fly. But since I’m not the nostalgic type, here’s what I really want: I’d like airports to wow me, like the first time I took in the immensity of CDG and just stood there for a moment, breathless. Either the world’s architecture has caught up to the airport experience or the builders of our airports have scaled back and allowed the rest of the world to catch up. But for those of us who love air travel, I want more than efficiency at the airport. I want an airport to be smart. I want to not have to think. (I have enough on my mind.) I want proper signage. I want to get from curb to gate in a straight line. I want lots of natural light. I want some decent food and a good bar. Once that’s happened, I want to be in a little bit of awe – by the audacity of the place, by its scope. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by people. I can do that at the local mall. I want to be overwhelmed by the entire operation.

At an airport – any airport – my kid is always a hive of activity. He feels a kind of sensory overload, and every part of the journey – driving to the airport, waiting for the flight, crossing the bridge to the airplane, being seated, lifting up in the air – is another piece of an unbelievable thrill. I know I’ll never get that back. But I’d like a morsel of it.

Because I still feel that awe when my aircraft starts its passage down the runway. Even after hundreds of flights, I still get a twinge of excitement when the aircraft accelerates. I stop what I’m doing, and I just take it in. I feel the power of the engines, the speed of the aircraft, and I’m a kid again. And who doesn’t want that? Alastair Gordon writes, “The airport is at once a place, a system, a cultural artifact that brings us face-to-face with the advantages as well as the frustrations of modernity.” Airports have always felt ahead of the curve. I can’t wait for them to feel that way again.

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net

Airports are more than cities. They are, to use a word that I’m starting to dislike more and more, communities. I dislike the word because of its egregious overuse, but I have to agree that it still means something in its original sense(s): a group of people living in one space under one government, or as a group of people sharing a common interest. Well, airports offer “community” for both and support both definitions. And at a place like Heathrow, which is not the world’s greatest airport, not by a long shot (in fact, it continues to be ranked as one of the world’s worst airports), this sense is heightened by the immensity of the place, by the fact that it creates its own ecosystem, with various communities under one roof. The pre-security agents and businesses, for example. The cleaning staff. Security. And then post-Customs, the duty free area (one thing that is done properly at Heathrow, though Terminal 3 is still rather cramped) and its employees, the customs agents themselves, the gate personnel, baggage handlers. (Writer Alain de Boton talks about this almost exclusively in his new book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, a title that renders the contents of the book self-explanatory.)

You walk through a large airport and you very quickly realize you are in more than a simple transit point. And even if you are running through an airport, that feeling of being in something larger, of being a part of a community, becomes apparent. Your fellow passengers, regardless of where they are going, are obvious partners, everyone a citizen of Airworld. I find affinities with almost everyone in an airport. So in Heathrow, with the agent at the Air Canada counter, sure, but also with the salesman in the Paul Smith store, with the cashier ringing up my purchase of Pimm’s and Fortnum and Mason lemon cookies (try it) and the lady restocking the salad bar in the lounge — all were denizens of the larger community of Heathrow, itself part of Airworld. Contrast this sense of community with one in, say, a hotel — where your common experience is the property and the city you are in — and you begin to see how different and unique Airworld really is.

Some airports are so dreadful that the feeling of community is almost defensive (I’m looking at you LGA), the commonality being shared negative feelings toward the space (which, in the real world, might lead to something like revolution). But not every place in the world is going to be to everyone’s liking. And there is a kinship in that feeling, too. Of course, the opposite is also true. I have found that the experience in well designed airports, like YVR (Vancouver) or DTW (Detroit), to be different but for opposite reasons. Especially in an airport like DTW, where almost everyone is in transit, the fact that it’s almost impossible to get lost adds something positive to the conversation (“Can you believe this place?”) and also, ironically, takes something away from the conversation (this is my take, so please comment if you disagree, but isn’t the rapport with a stranger heightened by a shared grievance?). Two airports that make me feel both? YYZ and ATL.

Despite its many flaws, Airworld is still a sexy place. A place like Heathrow, with people literally flying all over the world from one spot, is a remarkable place to realize the vastness and diversity of Airworld, of ideas travelling and coming together in unexpected ways. The modernity of Airworld, and the speed with which one can now transmit ideas both seen and heard (like this) is not just thrilling, it’s something one has to absolutely accept in order to not just get ahead in the world, but to keep up with it. And in the communities that are airports, ideas don’t just move, they move at supersonic speed. Transmitted instantly.

When I was a kid, my father used to take me to a grassy field at the end of one of the runways at YUL and we would watch the airplanes take off and land above our heads. Sometimes, we would even go to the terminal building itself and step out onto a viewing deck to watch the world’s aircraft taxiing right below us. We would spend hours there and we usually packed a lunch.

These days, we would not be able to step out anywhere for security reasons. And we wouldn’t need to pack a lunch. That airports have become shopping malls is well documented. Transumers spend money and smart airports planners are only too happy to design spaces that allow Transumers to do what they do best. But all those shopping spaces have always been designed for people on the move. Now, it seems, airports are also trying to attract those staying put.

Meaning the airport as mega mall is getting its own kind of semantic makeover. It wants to become a destination in its own right. Authorities in Zurich are doing this by bringing back the viewing platform and even helping organize children birthday parties and by reimbursing parking fees for shoppers. In Vancouver, airport authorities have seen an upsurge in calls from wedding planners ever since the Canada Line reduced commuting times to the airport to less than 20-minutes from downtown (which is perhaps not much of a stretch given that the Fairmont Vancouver Airport has hosted weddings for years).

That Airworld is a powerful economic engine to local economies has been understood since the birth of air travel. The term Airport Cities is a clunkier version of Airworld (I’ve also seen the term Aerotropolis), but there are annual conferences for those intimately connected to Airworld or, at least, plotting its future. And the amount of studies about “emerging” Air Cities will soon rival the amount of talk about “edge cities” and the “new urbanism” we endured in the 1990s.

Not all airports will succeed in the wider, broader Airworld. And only a handful will be successful at attracting locals to shop, play, eat or get married. The idea of getting married at YVR works because it isn’t too far from the urban core, it is amazingly accessible by public transit (meaning a direct train link), and its design and function have not excluded locals.

Airports have an advantage as destination that is unique: the romance of travel. Yes, most people still love the idea of travel. They still idealize it. And airports are cathedrals to that idea, incarnations of the interconnectedness of the world. My joy at seeing an aircraft take off when I was a child exists still. I remain enthralled by flight. Luckily, I fly enough that I don’t need to go to the airport just to watch the airplanes. But if you want to soak in the atmosphere of travel without having the means or desire to leave, the world’s airports are beginning to answer to your specific needs.

Photo: Nibaq (flickr)

By now, many of you have heard of Terminal Man, a would-be air traffic controller who is going around the US, sleeping in airports for Wired magazine. It’s a social experiment of sorts, with the requisite social media bits (@flyered) and blog and, while interesting, it’s a little dishonest in my opinion. Why? Because no one travels like this.

Last year, I had an idea that ran along similar lines. I would stay within Airworld for a week or two. But to me, Airworld includes hotels attached to terminals, and even the “cities” that spring up around airports to service the business of the place and the people who work and transit there. I had an itinerary mapped out that included hotels within terminals in Europe and and North America. I would take red-eye flights when possible. This to me would have been a better experiment. As a frequent flyer, I hoped it would tell me (and my readers) something about who we are and, hopefully, modern life in general.

Let’s face it, the only times we end up sleeping in the airport it's almost always due to a weather delay. The photo of someone horizontal inside the terminal will always make the news because it is the very definition of inconvenience. And it’s because of this inconvenience that we have hotels at airports. This makes the most perfect kind of sense. It’s why the Fairmont at YVR always gets high marks from travelers in any survey of any kind of hotel. It’s why YUL has a new hotel attached to the terminal (and has seen enormous construction of hotels near the airport in the last few years as well). These hotels are where most of us would sleep if given the choice. Airport hotels are popular for business people and transumers of all types because sometimes leaving Airworld is not only inconvenient, but impossible.

And so I wanted to try and have the ultimate Airworld experience. My own work schedule, ironically, didn’t let me go ahead with it. So I’ve been watching Terminal Man (his real name is Brendan Ross) on his travels across the United States (Wired bought him a flight pass with Jet Blue) with some interest. But I can’t help but feel that, in the end, the whole thing is gimmicky. And won’t tell us anything at all about the experience of being citizens of Airworld. Yes, the extreme aspect of this makes it kind of like a NASCAR race. You want to see what happens to people who put themselves in extreme situations. But we would have learned more, as travellers, if he hadn't taken the extreme course. Or if I had cleared some time and actually done what I had wanted to do last year.

I won't deny the curiosity factor of the gimmick. Brendan Ross is like a human lab rat, of sorts, doing something a little off the wall and allowing the rest of the world to experience it vicariously. Maybe we'll learn a little something about ourselves and the world. Or maybe we'll just learn about his personal hygiene habits.

Incheon International Airport in Seoul is one of the wonders of the world. If you haven’t been there, photos don’t do it justice. It has been called the world’s best airport – I’ve never been, but everyone who has raves about it. And now, Incheon officials are planning something called “Air City,” which is just this far removed from the “Airworld” that I’ve been writing about in Flightgeist for quite a while. Air City would house apartments, amusement parks, convention centres, hotels and even a marina – all centred around the airport, one of the world’s largest.

I can see this evolving internationally so that Air Cities are built around major airports worldwide. If they had their own customs union, transumers would be able to fly effortlessly between Air Cities without going through customs. (Because all of Airworld would function like a kind of security bubble, they’d check into one and be free to travel throughout the rest.) It would be locals, interacting with the citizens of Air City, who would have to pass through security, both on arrival and on departure.

Incheon already owns the land around it – a slice of real estate the size of Manhattan (!) – so doing this is easy for them.

Air City makes sense on a lot of levels. My only hope is that a sense of place is not lost, and that an Air City in, say, Dubai, reflects the UAE’s unique history and culture. Otherwise, the idea of a worldwide network of Air Cities risks becoming just a series of generic urban spaces dislocated from their host countries.

I know I’m getting ahead of myself here. And I’m sure there’s more to this story. Stay tuned.

I love the time after you’ve just returned from vacation and the talk centres not only on where you’ve been and what you’ve done but on travel itself. The nature of travel, of going away, of experiencing a different place. And this, it seems to me, is true of business and leisure travel. 

If you’re like me, you travel for business a lot more than for leisure. There are perks to business travel, especially for those who travel a lot (and have traveled enough to have figured out what works for them, and, more importantly, have developed travel habits), and there are obvious perks to leisure travel (though I would argue that leisure travel is a perk in itself) but in the end these advantages aren’t that different. They amount to comfort, to a lack of stress, to knowing that something that you want will be delivered, to know that you are being taken care of. And that brings us back to comfort. Which is a subjective word, yes, so what is comfortable to even the same person is different when they are travelling for business and for leisure. I’ve said it in my column before, we are all different people when we travel and the type of travel we have embarked on divides us yet again. 

And there’s also this: even the most frequent of frequent flyers are on a type of voyage – perhaps not in the Homeric sense but a voyage nonetheless. Business people travel to advance their work, to meet, to grow, to discover something new. Cut out the work, and leisure travel does the same. And these days, with voluntourism, where you go to a new place and work/volunteer for a number of days or weeks (or months even), work has become a part of the “leisure” travel experience (and voluntourism has hit business travel as well: last year, I went to a conference in New Orleans and spent the first day constructing houses for Habitat for Humanity). 

Perhaps we need to redefine the idea of leisure. Or work. The night I returned from my vacation last week, I went down to my local bar and talked about my trip with the bartender. He said he wouldn’t take a vacation until the fall, maybe later. He was thinking of perhaps going to work at another bar. In Ireland. Just for a week. For vacation. Then we started defining leisure. Many drinks later, I called it a night. Luckily for me, the conversation is ongoing.