I Hate Airports

How could anyone enjoy them?

April 14, 2022


Had the United States actually implemented a vaccine requirement to fly I would have been completely happy to drive wherever I needed to to avoid flying because airports have no redeeming qualities. I don't understand why anyone would want to spend any amount of time in a building where they don't even trust you to bring a filled water bottle and try to confiscate granola bars from you before you are permitted to go in and have access to shops selling those things at an insane markup. Of course the same can be said of movie theaters but a minimum wage theater worker probably isn't going to care enough to actually take those things from you and they certainly don't dress themselves up to look like fake law enforcement to intimidate you into believing you're a criminal for possessing a bottle of shampoo. And that of course is only a minor annoyance compared to the others that people like me who have picked up the habit of always keeping multiple things on us that actually are illegal to take on a plane.

But of course that's not all, depending on what airport you are going into and the time of year you go you could spend hours just waiting for your personal belongings to be searched and for you to be patted down by someone who is in a job with a higher turnover rate than just about every other occupation in the country, nobody likes the TSA including the TSA. Of course this hours long wait in line is not a problem in most airports but the fear exists for all of them so even when your better judgment tells you it is unnecessary you try to get there two hours before your flight boards so that you can spend an hour and a half sitting in a waiting area that does not have nearly enough seats for the number of people that it is meant to hold. (That's one thing the Chinese did better than us at when they designed the Hong Kong airport)

This is of course assuming that you can actually find the gate where your plane is supposed to be, I have vowed never to fly through LAX again because when I was there my ticket didn't show what gate my flight boarded at and back in 2016 the international section did not have one of those boards that showed the status of all the flights and their gate. Had I not been lucky enough to hear the announcement that my flight had begun boarding we would have had no idea where our plane was and would have been stranded in that terribly thought out airport.

Then of course the airlines make you board the plane in the least efficient way possible, there was a brief time while most people were still afraid of the air that they breathed where this was not the case and planes were loaded from back to front as they should be but for some inexplicable reason they've returned to the practice of loading front to back causing everyone to have to trip over everyone else in order to get to the chair they will be confined to for at least the next hour of their life, being forced to wear a seat belt even as the plane is stationary on the runway stuck in a traffic jam as the control tower figures out how to sort everything out as the fire department cleans up a plane that caught fire on the runway.

In the past flying was a more pleasant experience, cabins were well lit allowing you to comfortably read a book to productively pass the time as you were being shipped from point A to point B and you were usually free to take the occasional peak our the window to see what life was like above the clouds. But those times are now over as even small planes now are expected to have screens that are at a perfectly ergonomic height that you can do almost nothing with. Because everyone is expected to be on either one of these screens or one of the other three that they likely brought, airplane cabins are almost always dark making it difficult and in a way socially unacceptable to read a book.

Then of course there is the whole mask charade going on on planes these days, thankfully the government seems to have finally run out of excuses to not please airline CEOs by removing the dumb regulation and masks on planes (at least in the US) shouldn't be a thing in a few days, but it is still quite ridiculous that it wasn't that long ago when the policy was that if mid flight one were to insist on breathing freely the plane would have to be grounded* while an instance of a masturbating four times on a flight, putting him on the sex offender registry, doesn't warrant such an urgent response. We live in a strange world, one I'm not excited to fly in.


* - I don't have a documented example of this actually happening bur I have been on a flight where the pilot implied that this was standard procedure.