Home: Airport

I am what Alain Botton, the author of A Week at the Airport, would call a nomadic spirit, who cannot commit to any one country, who shies from tradition and is suspicious of settled community, and who is, therefore, nowhere more comfortable than in the intermediate zones of the world, landscapes gashed by kerosene storage tanks, business parks and airport hotels. In short, the airports of the world and the cabins of Boeings, Airbusses, Embraers, Canadair Regional Jets and Bombardier Dashs are my second home.

Even though I am afraid of turbulence and flying at night and through thick clouds, I love the atmosphere at airports, which tells you that anything is possible. If money is not an issue, you can be anywhere in the world in a little more than a day. You can fall asleep in Europe and wake up in North America. You can get on a plane in summer and get off in winter. And if you listen closely enough, the majestic four-engine plane that just arrived from Asia might tell you a fascinating story about its eventful journey across the Pacific. 

After almost 20 years and 34 flights last year alone, I still remember my first flight vividly. It was an extremely bumpy Finnair charter flight from Vienna to Kalamata in Greece. Because my grandmother had told me that it was dangerous flying without your sunglasses on, I refused to get on the plane. A few steps from the white and light-blue plane, my mother hadn’t convinced me that it wasn’t necessary to put them on yet, so with at least 100 people in line behind us, she finally gave in to my request and took my small pink sunglasses out of her bag. 

It must have been quite an exhausting flight for my parents because I wanted to know every ten minutes if we were there already. I was also very curious about everything that happened on the two-hour flight, why the plane had to tilt, what fasten seatbelt meant, and why the flight was so bumpy. With regard to the latter, my father attempted really hard to find the best possible explanation, and I have to admit, I still have to laugh about it. He said that the pilot was a young blond Finn, who didn’t have much flying experience, and for some reason, childish naïveté perhaps, it didn’t even freak me out. Later, it turned out that the pilot really looked like my father had described him, but now I’m thinking if it was really so hard figuring out that the Finnish pilot was most likely blond.

I first crossed the Atlantic at the age of 12. Both flights were more adventurous than any of the ones I had been on before, not just because we flew Air France. Before the introduction of in-seat entertainment, there wasn’t much to do on the eight-hour flight from Paris to New York. Therefore, while my father watched silent Mr. Bean episodes on one of the four old overhead TV’s in the jumbo’s large cabin, I took a nap. I don’t remember the flight being particularly bumpy, but then again, I was only awake when it was time to have lunch and dinner, which we had selected from a small menu distributed before take-off.

The return flight was much more adventurous because the plane was broken, which, I guess, was not much of a surprise since we were flying Air France. After keeping us at the gate for more than two hours, they finally admitted that the jumbo’s engines had failed, and that we had to spend the night at Hotel Ramada near JFK Airport. While I was extremely excited about being able to watch Venus Williams play at the US Open that night, my father was not particularly happy because he had forgotten the key for his suitcase at home, and had to spend an hour in total opening and closing the suitcase’s locks with a small foil (yes, they were still allowed on planes back then). Luckily, my father got up early enough the next day to secure seats on the direct flight to Paris. Some unlucky passengers had to fly to Paris via Hong Kong because otherwise, they wouldn’t have gotten a return flight in days. 

While I only flew about twice a year when I was smaller and didn’t care too much about how I got to the lovely beaches of the Greek Peloponnese or the breathtaking rain wood forest of the small Canary Island Gomera, I became a passionate air traveler when I moved to Ireland at the age of 16. During my 17 flights that academic year, I flew through a thunderstorm in a small Aer Arann propeller plane from Galway to Dublin in Ireland, threw up on a Lufthansa plane from Frankfurt to Vienna, as well as at Frankfurt Airport, figured out that it was quite hard to communicate to a German stewardess that I urgently needed a puke bag (Speibsackerl in Austrian German, Kotztüte in German German), had to pay almost 1000 Euros for overweight luggage, and started getting interested in what plane took me home to Austria or to my second home in Ireland.

My love-hate relationship with air travel got even more serious during my university studies in Austria, Switzerland, Malta and the United Kingdom. After being at home all over Europe for over half a decade, I have finally (temporarily) settled down on the West coast of Canada, which, however, means that I have to fly even more often. Even though I’ve started to realize that it is sometimes nicer relaxing on the couch, watching a James Bond movie than having to rush from terminal one to terminal three at Heathrow Airport to catch a 10-hour connecting flight, I still love the atmosphere at airports, the endless possibilities that air travel has introduced to the world, as well as writing about my experiences at the world’s airports and on board various fascinating aircraft.

When things just keep getting worse...

Still shaky from what had been one of my most nerve-racking plane journeys yet, I was making my way to the baggage carousels at Vienna Airport when I heard an announcement that the departure of flight LH1239 to Frankfurt would be delayed by around 15 minutes because the cabin preparations were taking a bit longer than expected. Knowing exactly what had happened, I couldn’t help but chuckle a little. But let me start from the beginning. 

Having become a victim to Prof. SW’s junior professor syndrome, I decided that the only way out of my misery was to escape the continent where the corpus delicti had occurred and book a flight to the city where some cats enjoy eating potato peel, frozen yogurts are called Kurts and having grumpy waiters is part of the coffee-drinking experience: my hometown Vienna.

Sadly, when something bad has happened to you, there are times when things just keep getting worse. The day I desperately wanted to escape the new world wasn’t any different. According to the check-in agent, I only had a stand-by ticket for the transatlantic flight, and since it was almost full, there was a chance of me not being able to get a seat. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything because he didn’t have access to the operating airline’s reservations system, so I took my seat on the small propeller plane, the first out of three that would take my to the old world, knowing that I had to check in again at the next airport, even though check-in would be about to close by the time I got there, and that I might not be able to leave the country as soon as I’d hoped.

After negotiating with a check-in agent and a lady at the ticketing desk for about half an hour, and being held up at security for too long, I sprinted to gate D55, my cabin trolley in one hand and my ticket in the other. It turned out that boarding hadn’t even started, but for the first time in more than a year, I didn’t get upgraded to business class on a flight to Europe, and was stuck with seat 29A, in a row that lacks windows. Even though I am a frequent flyer, I am scared of turbulence and I freak out if I don’t see where I am. All efforts to persuade people around me to switch seats with me failed, as it turned out a window seat without a window is a deal-breaker for windowseat-o-phile  people. Since I was really depressed about what had happened at university, I had hoped for an upgrade to cheer me up, but instead, I was trying to cry myself to sleep in my windowless window seat. 

After being half-asleep for about 10 minutes, I suddenly felt a stinging pain in my stomach. I climbed over the “for the duration of the flight”- dead Asian woman next to me and tried walking up and down the cabin, but my cramps only got worse. I could barely stand up straight and all I got from a flight attendant walking by was “are you ok?”. Before I could answer him, he had already disappeared to the downstairs area of the A340-600, where the cabin crew beds and most of the plane’s toilets are located. Oh how good a flat bed in business class would have felt at that moment. After a few minutes of hunching awkwardly in the galley, I decided to try to distract myself with a movie, which worked for a while, and I actually got a bit sleepy. This might be my only chance to get a bit of rest, I thought to myself, and put on some classical music to help me fall asleep. A few moments later, I started hearing all kinds of noises in the background- opera and BBC news mainly- and it dawned on me that my entertainment system was broken because I heard the audio from all seats around me. I probably never noticed during the movie because there was a lot of loud noise, people were talking and of course there was background music, but relaxing classical music didn’t seem to be able to cover up the other audio channels. A member of the cabin crew reset my entertainment system three times, but nothing changed. Could this journey get any worse? YES! 

After touching down at Frankfurt Airport, we taxied across the whole airport for almost 20 minutes, and I was shifting nervously in my seat; my connecting flight was in less than an hour and I knew I’d have to transfer terminals to catch my domestic flight. We finally came to a stop near the Lufthansa cargo hangar, probably at the parking position furthest from the terminal building. “Great,” I thought, “now I also have to take a bus across the whole terminal” and I already imagined myself trying to get a ticket for the next flight to Vienna. Things kept getting worse. People were already impatiently standing in line to exit the aircraft when the captain made an announcement: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am so sorry, this has never happened before, but we were assigned a parking position for an A320 instead of an A340. The tower was able to reassign the parking position quickly, but the busses and mobile stairways were already waiting for us at the wrong parking position, so it might take them another 5 or 10 minutes to come over here, since we are at the other end of the airport.” I was so tired after my 10 hour flight that I could barely stand up, and I knew I had to run across the whole terminal building, through the transfer tunnel and possibly across the domestic terminal as well, as the flights to Vienna often depart from one of the gates furthest away from the transfer tunnel. Great, I thought, can this get any worse? YES, it can!

Another 20 minutes later, exhausted from running to catch my connecting flight, I found myself in the boarding area of a B gate. What a relief, it was one of the rare occasions that a Lufthansa flight to a Schengen country didn’t depart from the A terminal, so I didn’t have to run that far. The flight was also delayed, which was good news because otherwise, the fight might have already left without me. The bad news, however, was that the plane, again, was parked on the other side of the airport, at an outside position, and that we had to take another bus to get there. I took the opportunity and quickly brushed my teeth and around 10 minutes later, found myself in the back of an A320 to Vienna. I usually hate sitting in the back of a plane, but because I’d been unable to check in, all the good seats were already taken by the time I was finally able to check in at the airport. My only consolation was that the flight would be quite short, at least in comparison to the transatlantic one I’d just survived. Take-off was fairly quiet and I was already imagining how I would surprise my grandmother, who, since I booked my flight last minute, knew nothing about my visit. My mother had decided not to tell her to make it more exciting.

Suddenly, I was awoken from my reverie by the plane dropping down- it felt like at least 50 meters. I looked up and saw how my neighbor’s red wine was lifted from his glass by gravity and dispersed all over the poor man’s beige pants. To distract myself from the extreme turbulence, I started giving the man unsolicited advice on which drinks not to choose on inter-European flights, such as red wine. I don’t know if he was grumpy because the fasten-seatbelt sign was on and he couldn’t go wash his crotch or because I was being Ms. smarty-pants, declaring that it might have been better if he’d chosen white wine. I got more and more scared because the turbulence continued and we were flying through clouds the whole time, which I don’t like since I don’t see where we’re going. Even though the flight was still a bit bumpy, I started breathing normally when we left our cruising altitude and the clouds started clearing. Usually, I don’t mind turbulence before landing because I can already see the ground clearly and the plane is about to land anyway (hence the blog title), but this time I did. I noticed strong crosswinds and every couple of minutes, gusts of wind tilted the plane in a worrisome angle to the runway. Shortly before touching down, the plane was hit by a gust and dropped down 10 or 20 meters. The landing was so rough that the oxygen masks dropped down and the pilot had to work really hard to get the plane straight to avoid an excursion into the grass next to the runway. 

When I was walking towards the luggage carousels at the airport, I was just glad I’d survived this awful trip, and thought that it could not possibly get any worse. When I exited the airport and met my parents, I was told that my grandmother had fallen down the stairs when she was on vacation in Poland two days before and that she had to spend the night at the hospital, but that’s an entirely different story. The first good news of the day though was that miraculously she had no broken bones, just contusions; she was even joking that her doctor might have wrongly diagnosed her with osteoporosis. And in the end, the trip did get a lot better; after all, I got to met His Holiness the Dalai Lama for the second time within less than two months. This certainly deserves its own blog post one day.