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THE AIRPORT


They have become – quite unfairly – associated with aggravation and ugliness, but more imaginatively considered, airports are among the most impressive structures ever put up by our wretched species. If we were tasked with showing a visiting Martian the best of human capacities, we could do worse than to take them to the airport for a look around. We are, for the most part, messy, indolent, querulous, and irrational animals, but in the operations of an airport, we put our better sides forward: our powers of foresight, temperance, reason and ingenuity. At home every night, we shout, despair, curse and degrade, but within the airport precinct, only our more inspiring strengths are encouraged to emerge. We carefully track and help bring down to earth a 200-tonne airliner approaching the airfield at 150 knots from the southeast in a rainstorm; we inspect the fan blades inside an engine that was – only a few hours ago – firing across northern Greenland at temperatures of 1700°C; we fill two underwing tanks with 230,000 litres of Jet A-1 to carry 400 people and their luggage to Los Angeles at Mach 0.85. Within ordinary conversations, we suffer from no end of misunderstandings; we must devote hours to unpicking the gap between what someone said and what they might actually have meant. But there are no such ambiguities out on the runways and aprons. An otherwise taciturn and heavily accented Bulgarian pilot will at once understand a German controller who tells them: ‘Taxi to runway three four; hold short of Delta’ and there will be no one at the front of any of the hundreds of aircraft on the move who won’t immediately know what is at stake in the command: ‘Heading two three zero, runway two seven Left.’ Everywhere in the airport, awesome powers are involved: 72,000 pounds of thrust are being shot onto the runway as a Hanoi-bound 777’s nose points skywards, and fourteen wheels, each one weighing some 109 kilos, prepare to leave the ground. Yet the rage is contained, logical, utterly within parameters. No one loses their temper; there is a serenity at the heart of the inferno. A pilot can bring a 73-metre-long, $450 million hull the size and weight of many houses to within a millimetre of its designated stop zone on the taxi line. It is like the hand of a giant caressing the brow of a child. Humans, so unimpressive singly, are united in a giant collective effort of the will to produce a spectacle of rare dignity. Airports are the cathedrals or the Roman aqueducts of our time. There is further hope because of how easy it feels here to escape our present reality. There are endless planes begging to carry us to the other end of the world. The screens are blinking with flights for Montevideo and Tbilisi, Jakarta and Lusaka; the names alone have a poetry to them. We don’t necessarily need to go anywhere; it’s simply immensely reassuring to feel that we could. The future may have disappointed us in many ways. It is ugly, disputatious and remarkably slow; we’re still waiting for jetpacks and eternal life. But out at the airport, there is an alternative futuristic world waiting for us, showing us what it might be like if human beings could overcome their obtuseness and live up to some of the promises of technology. Though we may be in a hurry to reach our so-called destinations, we don’t necessarily need to go any further than we have; this might have been the best bit of the journey already.

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Location: Long Beach, CA 90804, USA

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