I don’t know about you but whenever possible, I like to be at the airport early. Once you are through security, airports can be such fun places! I am not talking about the shops and restaurants, they are there to take your money while in fact there is much better fun close at hand… and it is free. It is watching the constant ebb and flow of people, the endless variety of humanity that, watched closely, will give you a profound experience of togetherness and fun. When waiting for a flight, we all are the same (well, business lounges apart…), will go through the same doors, have the same experience… but before getting there, people constitute a live movie, a live podcast and watching them beats any shop or restaurant and most Hollywood movies too.
Writing about people, about passengers in an air traffic management blog is appropriate. After all, we all have dedicated our lives to serving them according to our own means and capacities. They all belong to Homo Sapiens but they can still be categorized into distinct sub-genres and, perhaps not unexpectedly, they come in standard shapes and sizes that bear easy cataloguing no matter which airport you are at.
Let’s now see what my watching session came up with one early evening waiting at Vienna airport recently.
The first thing that strikes one is that we no longer dress for flying. True, there are places in the world where you can go to the opera in blue jeans but there used to be a time when taking a flight was an occasion to put on our best Sunday clothes as if we were going to the opera (where blue jeans were still a definite no-no). But no longer. Passengers milling around wear everything from formal to casual and below… I wonder how many of them know (or cares for that matter) that ages ago, there was an airline in the US, called Eastern, which actually published in their timetables the color of the upholstery in the plane so that passengers could dress accordingly. I am not joking… And if there was a change of equipment and a lady found herself wearing the wrong color skirt? “Mrs. Jones, please hurry changing the color of your skirt, you are delaying the flight!”.
It is also noteworthy to observe that practically everybody, men, women even kids, seem to be hauling a computer of some kind. Yes this is the digital age but still…
The bags, carts, trolleys and what have you that people are pulling behind them also exhibit an endless variety. No doubt most of them were bough at least in part because of the label claiming that it was the standard airline size for cabin luggage… Just try to fit some of them into the basket kindly provided by the airlines to check the size to realize that either the airlines cannot measure, or the Chinese used the wrong reference…
Watching the bags, you cannot fail to notice that the rule of some airlines limiting the number of cabin luggage items per passenger must be the most disregarded rule right after speed limits in Belgium. People seem to interpret the rule as one item per hand or rather, limb… How did they ever get on board???
There comes the well-equipped. This is usually a man, with trolley behind him, computer bag on the trolley handle, cell phone with ear buds in his suit pocket, bag of (what used to be tax-free) goodies in his other hand… he is full of self assurance. Not much fun to watch.
But that other guy, the runner! He is youngish, disheveled, obviously desperate and sure that he will miss his flight. Never mind that there is still an hour until boarding time, he will run from his arrival gate to his destination one. I keep wondering, is he the guy whose name has been on the public address system at least ten times urging him to come to the gate… or is he just one of the garden variety compulsive runners?
Then there is the girl, gliding down the polished tiles of the concourse, wearing strange clothes and stranger hairdo… She belongs to some obscure sect and will no doubt entertain the unfortunate soul in the seat next to hers with doomsday stories talking until the guy agrees to take her brochures just to have her shut up.
And the old couple! They are walking slowly, years of work and fun obviously having taken its toll on their bodies. They are holding hands and peer at the monitors and their boarding cards anxiously, afraid to make a mistake in this alien world of noise and commotion. When their kids in Canada sent them tickets, they did not consider just how big a challenge an airport can be to old people used to the quiet of their homes. They are the generation that watched their kids grow into the digital revolution and their grandchildren being born with an iPod in their hands and their identification in kindergarten being an IP address instead of a carrot of a rabbit…
But not all old people are like that. Here comes the digital grandma with cell phone and music player hanging on her sweater. She will no doubt show the cab driver where she wants to go on a paper map she printed herself direct from Google Earth.
Mr. Beer-belly is also a phenomenon and obviously much loved by the bar concession holders. His shirt is hanging out, front and rear and he will need an extension to his seat belt… We seem to be hung up about too little leg-room. Well, for him belly-room is probably more of an important concept.
It is of course bad for people to grow fat, obesity is a killer. But it is a private matter otherwise. What is not private is the situation when you heve a jovial 400 pounder next to you on a regional jet… He will be full of apologies as he squeezes his bulk into the protesting seat which was designed to take several g-forces but not the sidewise pressure that makes it expand at the expense of your spaced purchased with your well earned cash… Mr. Jovial will just smile while you gasp for breath. Based on my observations that evening, there was several of his kind heading towards their unsuspecting travel mates…
Then there is the suit… he is nearing retirement age and arrived at the airport full with frustration. Deals that did not work out, unruly employees, impolite cab drivers… they all combined to make his day rotten. By the time he boards the homebound plane, he is ready to explode with acerbic venom. He is the guy who used to travel in business class but has to make do with coach now. He will arrive last and crush YOUR bag and coat as he tries to push his Hugo Boss jacket into the overhead bin with enough force to make the fuselage bulge.
What about the boss travelling with a much younger female companion? You can spot them from miles away and no amount of careful disguise can hide the fact: those two have shared more than just trade secrets during the conference they attended. Spouses and company accountants will forever stay in the dark as to what exactly that sharing involved.
With the week-end and school holidays coming up, families with kids were out in force. Those ranged from the totally disciplined a la Family Trapp from the Sound of Music to the totally dysfunctional a la Dennis the Menace. This latter group holds the sweet kids who will keep shaking your seat-back throughout the trip and give it an extra big kick just when you are about to drink your coffee…
Then the single mom with her brood… She is struggling to keep up but has obviously learned long ago not to make a big deal out of what her kids are doing. Whether she travels alone because they lack a father or just because he is away on a trip, ending up with them near you can be bad news indeed. Some years ago we had occasion to fly back and forth between Amsterdam and Boston a lot and those trips were invariably in business class (nice old days those…). One time coming back to Europe, we were treated to this kind of fun with three howling kids and their mom. The kids would not stay in their seats and in the end she made a bed for them on the floor between the seats. They went to sleep there much to the delight of the other passengers. But the bliss did not last long. As we flew into some turbulence and the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign came on, kids and all had to return to their seats and the howling resumed…
We read a lot about the health hazards of cell phones and I can now confirm that they definitely make you blind! What else could explain the behavior of passengers dashing through the terminal, talking into their phones, apparently blind to everything else. If you do not jump to the side, they will bore right through you and oftentimes they narrowly avoid pillars, barriers and other obstacles normal folk avoid with ease. The Talker is a new breed, apparently evolved to a higher level of existence where eyesight is no longer needed.
The music lover is also easy to recognize. He or she walks around with a noise cancelling headphone into which music blasts at levels similar to the insides of a jet engine. They are not blind and hence will not run you down. But they are deaf… Public address announcements leave them cold and they fit perfectly in those airports where such announcements have disappeared with the DC-9.
Airports are smoke free these days yet it is easy to spot the smokers amongst us. He is likely to dash through the airbridge, gasping for air, desperately looking for the few and far between places reserved for smokers. On closer examination you will see that he is not gasping for air, he is suffocating from all the smoke free oxygen in the terminal. As he nears the glass enclosure that is not unlike the water tanks fish are kept in, he is already grabbing for his cigarettes and lighter and diving into the smoke-filled interior he lights up with the look of the redeemed on his face. From a distance the tank is not unlike a scene right out of a horror movie… Human shapes milling around in white smoke, slowly turning into who knows what. If you get a fellow passenger on your flight who has spent any time in one of those tanks (or are they booths?), you will get nicotine poisoning just smelling his clothes!
I said we do not dress up for air travel any more and this is generally true. But every so often you can spot the odd woman who thinks otherwise. She is dressed to perfection; no protocol chief could fault her attire, probably judging it appropriate for visiting royalty. She will sport enough jewelry to hold up the security line and even when she swears that she had taken off everything, the metal detector will glow red from the few rings and stuff she forgot anyway. High heels are back in style and I can almost see her arguing with the cabin grew in case of an evacuation that she wants to keep her high heels on, the slide be damned.
And who would that young lady be, with the worried expression on her face? She does everything right but you can see this is not her element. She would love to talk to someone but is afraid to address strangers… She calls home for reassurance before disappearing into the boarding bridge… Yes, there are people here who are taking their first-ever flight!
With the boarding time of my flight fast approaching, I had to suspend the observation session and walked to the gate. Sitting near the gate agents’ station I realized that there was one final breed of passenger I would have the good fortune of observing tonight, The Complainer! The species came in a group of four, obviously businessmen and clearly ready for a fight. Two of them fell all over the girls keeping watch and they had a whole list of grievances. Why did they have a different gate number on the boarding pass from the actual one? You printed it last night and the gate was changed… They wanted to sit next to each other… Sorry, can’t do it now, the plane is full. You should have picked the seats last night when you checked in… You can pick your seat??? Yes you can! Your website sucks it did not tell us this! So they carried on for several minutes, in the end concluding that the girls were not doing their job properly and the airline concerned was the worst in the world.
When they finally retreated, I could not keep myself from giving the girls a grin and saying: “If they continue like that on the plane, I am going to kick ass!” Both of them smiled back and the taller one said in a whisper: “Sir, don’t wait until you are in the plane. Start right now!”
