Airports and Aeroplanes

There are plenty of reasons someone might hate airports. Long lines, security checks, inflated prices, potential delays, general uncertainty, banished baggage, labyrinthine layouts, lethargic layovers, overstimulating noise, and a whole range of factors outside one’s control.

As a general rule, nobody who is at an airport wishes to be at an airport. People working there would rather not be. People going on a holiday would much prefer to already be at their destination. Businesspeople would rather have already closed the deal or not be working at all.

All that said, I love being at airports. Almost every visit I’ve paid to an airport has been for the purpose of a holiday. Thus, an ebullient excitement accompanies being present there. The knowledge that I’m soon to be exploring strange new worlds. Places much like my own, yet slightly different. Just different enough to feel separated from the reality I know and expect.

As far as I’m concerned, an airport may as well be a different country – maybe even a different planet. I love the surreal disconnection from the ‘real’ world. The removal from one realm and subsequent suspension in transition. Not yet fully gone from where I’m leaving but not yet where I’m going.

At an airport, time is merely a suggestion. It is dictated not by the rotation of the Earth or the watch on one’s wrist but by the departures on the board and the allure of sleep.

Every second person’s brain is tethered to a timezone differing from the one they are currently in. Sleep remains very necessary but becomes a decidedly abstract concept. You’ll need to find some soon though, because you’ve been up for 29 hours and you’re quite missing your own bed.

All is in flux. Everyone is coming and going – rushing businesspeople, hurried families. The airport is a space that nobody is truly present in – an ephemeral plane.

Even the stress of a tight layover with limited time seems a tad abstract. Disassociated perhaps. There’s a stress, an understanding that it will be bad if you don’t rush to your next flight, but yet it seems barely like an event.

As you progress through the spiralling warren of concrete and tile, you get glimpses of planes through various windows and viewing decks. Little slices of your end goal, or at least a representation of it, as you traverse through the corridors and lobbies.

Security has a queue, one that leads to a place of theatre. Rushed through scanners and metal detectors by people wearing stern expressions and with instructions barking out their mouths.

Then you get on the plane. Walking through a jetway or across the tarmac. I can’t help but think of space shuttles when stepping onto an aeroplane and seeing the heavy-duty door providing a passage through substantial thick walls as I pass through them.

It taxis around the runway, comes to a stop, then it starts with force. It rolls across the ground before hitting some critical point. A rumble takes hold as the plane picks up speed. The ground races past as the rumble grows. The windows show little but a blur as the tarmac speeds past.

What previously felt like a space shuttle now feels much more like a tin can.

The plane leaves the ground, and the roar of the wheels on the runway goes with it. Now only a rumble is present – both in sound and movement. The plane shakes and shudders as the plastic of the seats and interior creak and groan in unison. ¹

Then you find yourself sitting in a tube kilometres in the sky and seeing the world beneath you as you soar over it. Looking down at the little lights of the places you know as the twinkles transition into those you don’t. Thinking of the many times you’ve looked overhead to see a plane and of the sheer absurdity of flight in general.

The best time to fly is at night. I love the overhead lights. Pressing the button beams down a perfect cone that seems to defy my understanding of how light bounces. It is somehow completely and perfectly contained to the seat of the person who summoned it.

Depending on the flight, there might be food provided. Not food as generally understood, but something food adjacent. It is food in the most general of terms. Kind of as you know it, yet somehow different. Best described as “Food™”.

It’s odd to be in a place where strangers sleep. Where people doze off contently next to someone they have never before met. Though these sleeps are perhaps better described as naps, and those naps are only half-naps at best. You aren’t unconscious; you’re just not conscious. If aeroplane sleep was sold in a can, they’d call it a scam.

Most people in the cabin are trying to disconnect themselves from their reality. Their ears are plugged with headphones, and their faces buried in screens or the in-flight entertainment or even covered with cloth. Now we see people bury themselves in virtual reality headsets to occupy themselves - not just disconnecting but leaving for another reality entirely.

Every part of an aeroplane is optimised, with toilets being the obvious example. ‘Rooms’ small and compact with bowls containing disinfecting liquid of spectacular blues. A flush triggers not a trickle but a vacuum with tremendous roar.

After time in the skies, it comes to an end. Tray tables raised, window blinds open, devices disabled, and everything ready for return to Earth. There’s a loud rumble as the plane comes for a landing, and you once again find yourself in an airport. You step out into a world different than the one you’ve been in.

Regardless of the destination or purpose, there’s something enchanting about this temporary suspension between worlds. Airports and air travel exist in their own reality – a space where time bends and normality shifts. What I love most about airports and aeroplanes isn’t necessarily where they take me, but how they change my perspective, even if only for a fleeting moment in transit.

Footnotes

1. Leaving Wellington International Airport on a flight to Auckland was the most violent take-off for a commercial flight I’ve ever been on. Winds were high and rain was lashing. The plane was small due to being domestic and got battered around by the wind as it tried to find a place in the skies. I was mildly surprised they didn’t ground the flight. ↩