"The Naked Airport: Big Brother has hijacked our airports"

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Big Brother has hijacked our airports
By Leslie Mallory
Ireland - The Sunday Independent


GOLD watches are only part of it. An airport is to squabbles as fish is to
chips.

The new Dublin Airport Authority is to press for a second runway. Supporters
say it means more jobs and prosperity, but objectors say it'll disrupt their
lives. The head of the Enterprise Strategy Group, which sounds important,
says Shannon is better placed than Cork as an air hub, and Cork says no, it
isn't: nowhere is better placed than Cork for anything.

A new prime-time TV drama begins with the airport manager committing suicide
by stepping on to the runway in front of an oncoming jet. You can guess how
he feels. How do you manage somewhere that, in common with airport projects
across the world, generates so much dithering and second-guessing that it is
out of date by the time it opens?

The Naked Airport, just out in the US, is a book that confirms travellers'
suspicions. "The most recent airports look exactly like prisons," writes one
reviewer, "and it is no surprise to learn that their architects have
designed prisons as well."

Author Alastair Gordon shows in his wide-ranging study that it was indeed
Hitler rather than Bin Laden who brought this Big Brother disease into the
world's flight terminals. Gordon dates the change to Nazi Germany and to
what Goebbels called "the dethroning of the individual".

Tempelhof in Berlin was the first modern airport, "a reflection of this mob
philosophy. The message was assimilation and control".

>From the advent of the big jets in the mid-Fifties to the early Seventies,
there was a short reprieve when flying was actually fun. As hijackings
became more frequent the "fortress airport" appeared, "fashioned by security
codes . . . slabs of cast concrete, massive roofs and roughly finished
surfaces.Anti-terrorist measures turned the airport into an electrically
controlled environment rivalled only by the maximum security prison". The
airport was now referred to as "the Passenger Processing System". More
mechanical, more intrusive, more contemptuous of all those who must pass
through it.

Gordon admits that much of this is dictated by cold reality, but says
airports could be made more inviting and less brutal without jeopardising
security.

But the planners and architects are as much to blame as the terrorists. And
as much to blame too, perhaps, for disappearing tourists. While we decry the
controls at US airports, Americans don't have much time either for the folks
who took the fun out of flying.

"In the hands of a processing system that is rude, dehumanising, inefficient
and exhausting," says a Washington Post critic, "the price of going to Paris
or any other place you'd like to be is measured now not in dollars but in
fatigue and humiliation. The modern airport is a dreadful place and the one
certainty is that it will only get worse".

Places like the "odious" Charles de Gaulle are the Tenth Circle of Hell.

Those with an input into the future of aviation here can scarcely afford to
brush off Gordon's plane truths.


 Do you have an opinion about this story?
Share it with other readers in our CAA Discussion Forums

http://www.californiaaviation.org/dcfp/dcboard.php


*****************************************