Essay: ON FLYING MORE AND ENJOYING IT LESS

For I dipp'd into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales . . .

—Tennyson, Locksley Hall

HOW gloriously easy the vision of air transport seemed to the Victorians! And for a while, how reassuringly true it turned out to be! For years now, those "argosies of magic sails" have been gliding in and out of airports as if flight were as natural to man as walking.

Yet the sense of swift ease and mastery of this wonder is swiftly disintegrating. And the heart of the problem, as every airplane passenger knows, is on the ground. Airlines have perfected the art of getting from A to Z, while ignoring the place where all flights begin and end—the airport. Ideally, an airport is a conduit, a place to leave; in reality, it has become a gigantic waiting room, where exasperations multiply like chewing-gum wrappers and cigarette butts on the floor. One woe is the need for a great trek, first as much as three-quarters of a mile from parking lot to terminal, then on to the departure gate through hundreds of yards of echoing, aseptic corridors. Another is the need to stand in line: passengers must queue up to check in, make phone calls, grab a bite to eat, use the toilet, claim baggage, hail a cab. The whole airport experience sometimes becomes such an ordeal that just to enter the airplane is itself a relief.

But even there, delay and confusion continue. "Elephant lines" of as many as 25 planes often wait on runways to take off. A jet may circle for literally hours—hoping for clearance to land. In short, air travel, the great success symbol of 20th century man's conquest of space and time, is on the verge of becoming—like railways, highways, traffic and smog, a fit subject for bad jokes by stand-up comics. (Sample: "There really were three Wright brothers, but one is still stacked up over O'Hare.")

Airport congestion will soon be compounded by new "superjets" like Boeing's 460-passenger 747. By carrying more people, jumbos should reduce the total number of planes in the air. But on the ground, they will disgorge as many suitcases and passengers as three planes do now—and all at once. Says Najeeb Halaby, former administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency and now president of Pan American airlines: "There will probably be only one airport in the world ready for the superjets, and only one parking lot, only one set of highways. And," he adds, "they are not all at the same airport."

An Overdose of Success

Through an infinitely complicated mechanism, 135 million passengers were ticketed last year, encased in pressurized aluminum cabins, hurled aloft by 50,000 Ibs. of jet-engine thrust, comforted with rough California wine and bland Iowa steak. From the moment a plane takes off, it must be watched, first by radar at air-route traffic control centers, then by approach controllers, who assign the ship to a runway or stack it in a holding pattern. The trip costs the passenger about 5.60 per mile.