It’s time to empty your pockets, remove your shoes and submit to the naked x-ray in a ritual that assuages the fear of flying.
Airports come high on the list of our most dreaded environments, somewhere after the paedophile wing, crematoriums and the Korean Football Association. We really don’t like airports. They manage to be both incomprehensibly technocratic and redneck tacky. They are relentlessly efficient and infuriatingly slow. Aeroplanes rarely crash when you consider the impossibility of flight; it’s just the sheer absurd act of contrived faith that we believe that if you drive a jumbo jet at 160 miles an hour it will suddenly become lighter than air, and have enough lift to hoick 400 fat atheists who have all lied about their cabin baggage across a continent. Airports are particularly annoying because they don’t do what it says on the box. On the box it says ‘Welcome to Mother Teresa’. Well, it does if you land in Tirana, Albania, which is, to my knowledge, the only airport named after someone who thought you’d be better off dead. At least in Italy you can be welcomed to Leonardo da Vinci, a man who at least thought flight was probable.
Airports imply freedom and effortless transportation. You go to sleep in Europe; you wake up in Latin America. But first you have to go through a quarter-mile of queues that are like taking part in the Middle Ages. The queues part and re-form and split and become free agents and then they reconstitute themselves again, constantly disintegrating, re-forming and moving. It helps if you think of an airport as being a Petri dish incubating some world bacillus. (It helps, but I’m not sure what with.)
Airports are all bisected: they are problem and solution, frustration and freedom, departures and arrivals. They are the yin and yang of travel, the oldest, most ancient fear and relief. One of the things that differentiates Homo sapiens from our ape cousins is the ability to track ahead, to see a destination before you get there, to assume a route to it. The trepidation of leaving the cave and the fire, and then the relief of getting back, are implicit in airports. Our emotions in them are not entirely post-modern fury at the human speed of things or the pre-digital confusion. Airports are one of the very few areas of life that haven’t naturally evolved into being better, easier and more comfortable with time, technology and experience. We now look at the advertisements for flying in the ’40s – with their subtle mix of military can-do and ocean-liner obsequiousness – with envy. It was supposed to feel like a suave and sophisticated thing to do, this flying lark, with bone china and beds with real sheets. The airport was a comfortable, covetable waiting room.
Anyone who has travelled through a hub airport in America recently will know quite how miserable an experience they have managed to make it. There is now the added humiliation of the naked x-ray. American passengers are beginning to rebel, to refuse to be intimately examined in these infuriating, run-down cattle sheds. This is the most health-and-safety conscious nation in the world, where people will sue over hot coffee, where they print warnings and disclaimers on both chewing gum and assault rifles, and the combined demands of home security and health-and-safety have piled misery onto the dumb rote tedium of security lines. The one things that’s worse than being asked to remove your shoes, open your laptop, take off your belt, empty your pockets and remove your watch is to have to stand behind someone who has to do all these things and seems to have a magician’s number of pockets all of which contain small change, keys, phones and a half-full hip flask. Security trumps every other requirement or desire. Security is a ratchet that turns relentlessly to move every conceivable, statistical, minute chance of human interference and aerodynamics. The security consultants and the pat-down officers and the monitor-watchers and the conveyor-belt facilitators aren’t going anywhere, and they really don’t care if you are. The acquiescence to the innate goodness of airport security has become an absolute that no one in an airport is even allowed to question. The faintest mention of terror or box cutters will get you arrested and draconian charges dumped on your head. We all understand why this happens and, though irritated, we abide because we accept that safety is ultimate and we know why we go through this.
But actually, flying is safer than almost every other form of getting around. You are in far more danger on the streets of most cities from fundamentalists or international terrorists. It’s just that the consequence of a bomb or a fanatic on a plane is so catastrophic – but then no more so than a bomb on a train or a ship. Most 13-year-old boys could work out five or six scenarios for urban Armageddon that are worse than blowing up a plane. Hollywood spends a great deal of money thinking of them, and we live with that. We understand all the possibilities and we compare them to our ordinary coming and going and we reckon up the odds and we think they are so distant, have so many noughts, that we just forget about it. Wildebeest can’t insure against lions, but they understand that statistically it’s unlikely to be them. But this natural, rational discounting of possible danger against this necessity of continued living becomes a whole new equation in an airport. The odds are perceived to be far more perilous, the chances far steeper. It’s as if someone had blocked off half the holes on the roulette wheel.
I have a feeling that this is a realisation, a projection, of the innate and constant fear of flying itself. We perceive the danger to be added on to the already dangerous, nay impossible, activity of flying. It isn’t natural, it shouldn’t work. We may understand the dynamics of a wing passing through the resistance of the air, but still it’s a meagre trust to hand your life over to. We rationally understand that flying is safer than riding a bike or even a donkey, but emotionally we know it’s some unnatural alchemy. We accept the absurd level of insurance security because it is somehow a manifestation of a votive ritual that assuages our nervy fear. If you comply with the demands of security, if you put your moisturiser and toothpaste in a plastic bag, if you carry no sharp objects (not even a threatening necklace), if you turn off your mobile devices, then you will assuage the god of levitation who will gently deposit you in this thin and fragile cigar tube safely in Tenerife.
We call them airports and not airfields or dromes anymore after the very first one, which was in Southampton. And that really was an airport. It was where the flying boats landed, like the one in Sydney Harbour. Southampton Airport was also where the Spitfire was first tested. Its designer, R J Mitchell, was a driven man. He designed 24 aeroplanes between 1920 and 1936. He died in his forties of cancer. It was said he worked himself to death. He said, ‘If anybody tells you anything about an aeroplane which is so bloody complicated you can’t understand it, take it from me, it’s balls.’ And that could be the motto of all airports.
When the RAF took the design for his fast fighter he was informed they were going to call it the Spitfire and he replied that it was just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose. He personally called it the Shrew. On such insignificant footnotes do the destinies of nations turn. Imagine the Battle of Britain fought by Shrews. The few Shrews to whom so much was owed.