Modern Living: DESIGN FOR THE JET AGE

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AS every air traveler knows, one of the massive deterrents to flying is the walking it involves. With the coming of the jets and the extra space their blasting exhausts require, airport acreage has multiplied, and the problem has become worse. The hike from check-in counter to the farthest reaches of the San Francisco International Airport is more than a quarter of a mile, or twice around a football field at a nonjog trot. Puffed one woman soon after Atlanta's new $20 million airport opened in May: "I declare, if they had told me I would have to walk halfway to New Orleans, I'd have worn my shopping shoes."

On Stilts. Washington's Dulles International Airport, opened for business last week, is a gleaming glass and concrete monument dedicated to the abolition of the dread Last Mile in jet travel. The roof is a concrete hammock slung between rows of gracefully leaning concrete "trees"; everything else is glass, clear and untinted. More important, passengers emplaning at Dulles need walk only 150 feet to board the aircraft, although the plane is parked half a mile away.

The secret, if it proves as workable as its inventors hope, is the mobile lounge—a fat-tired monster that rolls regally over the landing strip like a parlor car on stilts. A few minutes before takeoff, passengers are ushered into the lounges, which fit snugly against the terminal building (flight schedules out of Dulles now quote the departure time of the lounge instead of the plane). Lounges are red-carpeted, air conditioned, furnished with comfortable chairs, soft lighting, tinted windows and, unavoidably, piped-in music. Upon reaching the waiting jet, an extensible ramp locks into the plane's door, and the passengers walk into the plane without ever being exposed to the weather.

Each of these upholstered Trojan horses costs a staggering $232,000 and carries 90 passengers. It takes two to fill up a giant jet. Dulles will have 20 of them. In disembarking at Dulles, travelers will go through a reverse process, but the lounge does not have to be turned around: it can be driven, pushme-pullyou fashion, from either end. Passengers docking at the terminal in the first week of operation emerged from the lounges like pleasantly surprised moths popping from cocoons. Even the lounge drivers seemed to like the new idea. Said one: "It's just like sitting on your front porch and driving your house down the street."

The first commercial airport to be designed specifically for jets, Dulles and its mobile lounges are the creation of the late Eero Saarinen. He was a thorough man. When he was asked to submit a design, Saarinen sent out researchers armed with stop watches and counting clickers to "see what people really do at airports, how far they walk, their interchange problems." The results of his findings were dramatized by longtime Saarinen Friend Charles Eames—for the benefit of the FAA and airline officials who needed convincing about mobile lounges—in a ten-minute cartoon film whose sound track featured the tramp-tramp, clunk-clunk of aching feet plodding through the measureless tunnels of the nation's sprawling airports.