Music for Airports

Have you been to an airport lately? Doesn't matter. It hasn't changed that much in a few years, except for the additional security measures. Go into an airport, and you see a row of counters, one for each major airline. If the airport is not a busy hub, then those counters are mostly empty, and the experience is somewhat pleasant.

But if the airport is crowded, say, like Dulles, you see hundreds of people everywhere, and lines everywhere. Typically, what you do is go to near the counter, and approach a large touch-screen pad, and enter information. This information allows you to get a boarding pass (usually), and then you might talk to someone at the counter to check in your luggages. Except.

Except that if the line is sufficiently long, you go to the front, get your boarding pass, and then head to some line. Which line is never entirely clear, because, heaven forbid that there is someone to direct you to the correct line. This creates bizarre confusion. Once I was in a Denver airport, and in this line that was very, very slow. It was hardly moving, and we had no idea why. Finally, we saw one of these touch-screen kiosks, cut to the front of the line, checked the luggage in, and headed to security. We must have saved ourselves half an hour by doing that.

Here's the solution. First, when you enter the airport, there should be kiosks. You let the kiosk know that you have entered the airport, and it indicates which "room" to enter. Instead of having counters, there are rooms. It's like visiting a mall. As you walk, you pass by storefront after storefront. Instead, each "room" or store belongs to some airline, and you head to the appropriate room. There may be a line in the room, but you have to enter in the room.

Furthermore, out in the common area, there is "customer service", so you can ask questions about the line you are supposed to be in. There's nothing more frustrating than standing in a line wondering if it's the correct line. Worse still, why are there only 3 people taking care of you?

Think of a large airline, like Delta. They might be using, say, 15-20 or more gates. Each gates usually has 2 people attending to the gate. That makes for 30-40 people helping out total. It might even be larger than that. Yet, they often have, what, 3 workers helping people check in? Come on! Is this really the place to be stingy? Have, 6-7 people working there, or more! Checking in is a huge bottleneck, and it seems to make little sense to have so few people taking care of this, when so many are devoted to each gate.

And why are there never enough seats to sit at in a gate? If you have the potential for 100 passengers, should you not have 100 seats or more? Yet, I find that there are always 20-30 people that have to make do and stand around because there are simply not enough seats to sit.

And why do airplanes seat from front to back? Should they not seat back to front? Wouldn't that make it more efficient? But efficiency isn't what it's about, is it? It's about first class passengers that need to be seated first.

Here's my cool idea. The airport should have something like roller coaster seats. You get seated in them. When the airplane is about deplane, the seats roll out of the airplane like roller coaster cars. Then, you roll in. That way, there's enough seats, there's no delay getting in and out of the plane. Only issue is how to get a track that goes into the plane and out.

My point, and it's not particularly brilliant, is that airports suck at what they're supposed to do, which is to make it convenient for you and I to travel. They've come up with bad solutions, which cause aggravation. The sad thing is that no airline company seems to be able to make a solution that would force the other ones to follow along. It doesn't take genius to do this.