How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Airports: A Review of Airports

It is 12:29 p.m. on a Sunday. I'm sitting in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport waiting for my flight to start boarding in roughly 20 minutes. I've spent the past thirty minutes navigating the bustling terminal back and forth grabbing food, a drink, and passing my gate several times in search of both of those (long story), passing a flight to Monterrey, Mexico, several times in the process while the gate agent calls for the next group completely in Spanish. 

Somewhere between my second and third time passing my gate, I come to realize. I think I love airports? 

As much as I'm obsessed with the eeriness of a liminal space designed for humans, but abandoned, I think there's a lot to be said about a liminal space designed for humans, but inhabited. To revisit liminal spaces, we can look back to when I first wrote about the concept in my review of 4:43 p.m. on a Thursday, but briefly, liminality refers to the state of being between two states, places, etc.. 

Airports, train stations, bus terminals, hallways, waiting rooms - these are the main liminal spaces we encounter on a regular basis divorced from the recent rise in popularity of certain online communities for experiencing or witnessing these spaces with no people in them. I can second that there is an eeriness for places designed for people, yet no people are in them. I don't often dwell on my thoughts of places designed for people, yet there are people in them. 

Why yes, I did find the creepiness liminal airport picture on Wikimedia Commons, why do you ask?

Usually, I am too focused on more pressing matters. Food. A drink. My gate. But as I am traveling alone on this occasion and there is no one else on whom my thoughts to focus, and as I have a few minutes of spare time, let's dwell on why airports are great, actually. 

A Place Designed for You 

Everything about an airport has been thought through with the utmost reasoning. Airports serve one purpose for the people who utilize them - they facilitate the boarding and onboarding of planes for people who are traveling from one place to another place. 

Everything in them, then, serves that one purpose - help people exist in a state between being on a plane. People have certain needs when they aren't on a plane. They require food. A place to rest. Announcements reminding them to be wary of unsupervised items. 

If we reference certain philosophies concerning the needs of human people, say, like Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we'll find everything we need to design a good airport. Announcements about being wary of unsupervised items serve our need for self-actualization, if you were curious. 

To this end, airports succeed. We have access to food. Water. Coke machines. Bars. There are screens sometimes that can entertain. My favorite screen entertainment is when the screen displaying my flight information keeps pushing my flight further and further out. This allows me to enjoy more of my time in the airport. (A lady just made use of the announcement feature to let us waiting for our plane know that the plane we are going to board has just arrived and that the people and luggage on that plane will need to deplane before we can board, thus the delay we are experiencing will be even longer). 

Take me back…

We also have access to space. Heaps of space. Airports are sprawling beasts of buildings to accommodate all of the space humans need when they are waiting. We have rows and rows of chairs with enough seats available so that no two unrelated parties have to actually sit next to each other, a favorite feature for an introvert like myself. We have spacious lanes of travel wide enough to double as the waiting space for people who choose to stand near the gate before their group number is called for some reason, thus blocking the paths of foot traffic for anyone wandering in search of a bottled Coke that they can take on the plane instead of the cup and straw that benefits no one. We have so many restrooms and water fountains, readily available and nearby so we never know freedom from the loud rushing flushes that never end. 

The waiting areas are carpeted with vague, nonthreatening colors and patterns just inviting enough for you to want to spend no more than three hours in. The type of carpet that you'd never want in your home. But this isn't your home. It's the airport. It's better than your home. You couldn't be around thousands of people you'll never talk to in your home. 

Back to School 

One of my favorite parts of airports is that in a lot of ways, it reminds me of being in school as a child. There are so many rules for travel. And there are so many authority figures who don't care if I live or die to enforce those rules. 

Breaking some of the rules can really ruin your enjoyment of the airport, like the kinds of rules that are also laws. But for the most part, the majority of the rules are seemingly small, unimportant rules - like needing to remove any electronic device in your carry on bag at security - whose infractions do not carry the weight of the severity of those put in place to enforce them. 

My absolute favorite rules are the ones that exist solely in my head. I didn't really know I had a low level of constant general anxiety until I started traveling on my own. All throughout my travel as a child, my parents instilled some ground rules that they insisted everyone else was following. Only bringing one carry-on bag even though two were technically allowed was one of these rules. Only using the overhead bin over your row was another. Using the bathroom before boarding began, yet another rule of my parents. You have to walk to your gate before stopping to get food. Then you can't leave the terminal your gate is in once you've found your gate, so you can only get food from that terminal. 

And as a good student, I followed these rules. To the letter. Until much later in life when I started traveling with my wife when she revealed that all of these rules weren't…rules…and that flying is nothing like school…because for the most part, save for those rules that are also laws, no one really cares what you do. 

I think that’s when a switch started to flick in my brain about my overall thoughts about airports. Because, let’s face it, school sucks. There’s too many rules and too many authority figures lording over you for not knowing or following the rules in a place that’s supposed to be about learning. 

Since the made up rules I’ve been carrying in my head art, in fact, made up, airports are nothing like schools. They’re anti-schools. Because truly, truly, no one cares about you at all in an airport. And that’s freer than flying. 

The People 

Now, everything in an airport is designed for the people using the airport. That's great on paper. Someone should really tell the people who work at airports, though. But that's what makes it so good. 

If the people who worked at airports bent over backward to serve everyone in them, no one would leave airports, which is like the whole point of them. So it's a good thing that the people who work at airports don't care if you live or die. Honestly, it should be a requirement. 

I recently had to travel *very* early in the morning. Like, wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning early. By the time we got to the airport, it was around 7, but it still felt like 4 a.m. to me. You'd think that for people working at the airport, they'd receive some sort of sensitivity training that explains they'll be working with people who are not used to getting up that early in the morning. These people's brains aren't working right. Be patient with them. 

The great thing about airports is that there is no such training. You will be treated with the same level of disdain no matter what the time, no matter how delayed your plane is, no matter how long your day has been. No excuses. No breaks. You should have known your jacket has metal buttons and taken it off before you walked through the metal detectors, you absolute waste of sentient intelligence.

Oh, we got your order wrong? Well, that’s too bad. There’s other people here who will receive their correct order, so get out of the way. 

I combed through hundreds of stock images until I could find someone who wasn’t smiling. This looks AI generated, too.

On my most recent early travel day, I stopped by one of the many available convenience stores to buy a water for my wife, a Coke for myself, and some sort of snack. In my sleep deprived state, this took my a good two minutes longer than it needed to, like a slack jacked zombie, I was bumping from display to display looking for a cheap snack under 3 dollars (challenge level: impossible). 

I step up to the counter to pay for these overpriced items and the person behind the counter asks me a question. I have no idea what she said. You see, I was for some reason prepared to make a comment about how early it was. Or maybe what I was buying. Some sort of low-level banter that I’ve come to expect from people, say, at my job, where I am forced to interact with people who make some pretty inane observations (your hair’s long is a frequent one). 

But this is the airport. Everything here is designed to facilitate the boarding or deplaning of people in transit. There is no room for smalltalk. 

What she had asked me, while I was preparing for smalltalk, was “Cash or Card?” The silence coming from me and the most likely blank stare I gave in response prompted her to repeat herself. 

Straight to the point. She hadn’t even scanned an item yet. Masterpiece conversation. 

The secret of airports is that the people who work in them do not want to be there any more than you do. And I can imagine why. For anyone who doesn’t work at an airport, there is an air of excitement when one is in an airport. Because you’re going somewhere else. It’s a break in the routine. As humans, we crave new environments, new foods, new places, new sights. Now imagine you go to a place that facilitates exactly that as part of your daily routine, only you don’t get to go anywhere but home afterward. It’d be hell. 

Let’s have some patience for the people trapped in airport hell when they don’t care if we live or die. Because, honestly? We should be thanking them for exactly that attitude. 

Arriving at Our Final Destination 

The next time you fly, take a moment to look around you once you get past security and find your gate and grab your drink or snack or what have you. Take a moment to appreciate a space designed especially for you for the express purpose of containing you while you wait to travel. Breath in the artificially cooled air shared by hundreds if not thousands of other people who are also traveling. Make eye contact with someone. Nod at them. You’ve made it. You’re in the upper echelons of human achievement: a place designed for comfort yet everyone leaves. This is luxury. These are airports. 

I guess it could be argued that any building is a space designed for humans to inhabit, and you’d be right. They’re not naturally occurring or anything. But there’s just something about airports, the mix of convenience and inconvenience, that makes them special. Better, even. And whether or not you think I’m being sincere or sarcastic, just know, you’re correct.