I fly an average of twice a month these days, usually for work, and although I spent much of my life afraid of airplanes, I now chase them with an addict’s need. If it has been a while since I have been aloft, I’m restless, peevish, mindless, tired—useless as a human being. The start of a flight heralds a game afoot. The rush is skittish and improbable. A freighted mass of metal rattling down the runway gains a sudden burst of speed and, in a small, miraculous gasp, loses its weight, rises, and soars, enacting careful turns and radio coördinations that accrue toward effortlessness. On the ground, on landing, it’s again a metal hulk; the metamorphosis reverses itself. A part of me is sure I’ll die at every takeoff, yet I need to feel that panic and lift or I’m hopeless. Flight is the best metaphor for writing that I know.
The sublimity of the act is heightened by the earthly mess around it. On arriving at the airport, you push your way through snarled security lines—the shoes, the belt, the laptop, the canopic bag of fluids—and purchase a day-old ciabatta sandwich. You sit and read, glancing at a suspended screen that seems to play only disaster news and weather reports from the Midwest. You hear your boarding announcement: more queues and lost elderly people with enormous bags. The airplane seems to hail from the same era as your old dishwasher, which conked out last year. The guy beside you has a wide stance and an overmedicated gaze that suggests he will drool during his sleep. It has been three hours since you left home, and you are still waiting.
Why do we board planes? Flying relies on an old, delay-mired technology, scarcely updated since the advent of the jumbo jet, and the sorts of people who can pay for tickets usually have better options for getting what they need. Once, if you had to make a presentation to your Tokyo office, you would fly there. These days, you can tap a few buttons on your phone or your computer and start beaming your PowerPoint deck onto a remote screen. If you’d like a bespoke lopapeysa, you don’t need to go to Iceland; you can order it online. The global promises of air travel—the wrinkles in time that allow the jet-setter to have breakfast in Boston and a lunch meeting in L.A., or to spend Friday seeing what’s new in Phnom Penh and still be at work on Monday—are today realized with much less trauma using screens. Sure, you still buy tickets back to Minnesota for your parents’ Christmas dinner, or to Tulum for a beach week. As a standard of global connection and fast access, though, air travel is now largely obsolete.
The forecast for the industry, accordingly, is bleak. “What is changing is that there is no promise of change, only a sort of numb acceptance of the beleaguered experience of flight,” Christopher Schaberg writes in “The End of Airports” (Bloomsbury), a wandering but well-fuelled study of air travel’s fading profile in our digitally transported age. “This acceptance is often signaled and mediated by where we look in airports: down into our palms, where faster and quieter machines connect us to one another.” Schaberg teaches literature, at Loyola University, in New Orleans, but he used to work at the airport in Bozeman, Montana, and his interest in the culture of flight arises from years spent on the tarmac and at the check-in desk.
Schaberg’s first book, “The Textual Life of Airports” (2011), explained how the airport mythologized and subverted air travel for passengers. That work emerged from his dissertation, and it followed a style of feverish pop-cultural close reading strangely valued in some academic quarters. It sometimes seemed a touch insane. (Puzzling over a Leo Cullum cartoon from this magazine—a guy dragging himself through the desert on all fours hears a boarding call and frets, “I’ll never make it”—Schaberg complained that the drawing “goes against the environmental writer Gary Snyder’s assertion that crawling can help people get to know their bioregions.”) “The End of Airports” is, pleasantly, less ramrod and more personal. Schaberg recalls the moment when air travel marked the apogee of cosmopolitan romance; he believes that the future favors virtual experience. He tells us, “In a world where social networking can facilitate revolutions, and where connections happen as easily online as off, it seems inevitable that moving hundreds of bodies around in large vessels will go out of fashion.”
Surprisingly, the numbers do not bear this out. In 1960, a hundred million people flew. In 2006, two billion did. Today, after the advent of the mobile Web and the intensification of terror-inspired travel constraints, 3.5 billion people fly every year. Schaberg’s inquiry is vexed, partly because he can’t decide whether the problem with flight is that it’s unfashionable or that it’s technologically obsolete. But the real contest lies elsewhere. The battle between jet planes and smartphones isn’t about speed or glamour. It’s about ways of knowing.
Several weeks ago, I found myself at a lunch seminar of neuroscientists in Central Jutland, halfway up the Danish coast. The day’s lecture was short, with slides; the speaker, a neuropsychologist named Chris Frith, argued that a crucial feature of consciousness was regret. I had flown to Denmark a few days earlier, for other escapades. The reason I had been invited to the seminar was that I’d met a postdoc researcher one night at an underground circus held at an artists’ commune. The reason I was at the circus was that a magician with a black coat and a pencil mustache had urged me to go; I’d been introduced to him two hours earlier, by a Danish artist who had once been an acolyte of Allen Ginsberg, in New York. I had been pointed toward the artist after asking about a lobby mural while checking out of my hotel that morning. Whatever I felt for those days’ adventures, it was not regret.
Flight, from the start, was thought to prime encounters of this kind. “Most of our existing methods of transport, together with the physical and mental emotions that accompany them, will be profoundly changed,” Rudyard Kipling told the Royal Geographical Society, in 1914. “The time is near when men will receive their normal impressions of a new country suddenly and in plan, not slowly and in perspective; when the most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week’s—one hundred and sixty-eight hours’—travel; when the word ‘inaccessible’ as applied to any given spot on the surface of the globe will cease to have any meaning.” Kipling’s tone was magisterial, but, as someone who had made a career out of describing journeys to far-seeming regions, he was marking the terms of his own artistic eclipse.
That was in February. By August, 1914, the First World War was under way, and Kipling’s vision was thrust into battle. Airplanes, a novelty technology that had first been series-manufactured a few years earlier, were dispatched for reconnaissance. In the spring of 1915, the French aircraft company Morane-Saulnier found that if you mounted a machine gun up front and put bullet deflectors behind the propeller blades you could shoot from the cockpit without damaging your own plane. By the Armistice, in 1918, France, Britain, Germany, and the United States had together produced nearly two hundred thousand aircraft and trained enough pilots to fly them. Commercial aviation was the afterglow of a campaign for terror in the skies.
It was the Europeans, not the Americans, who first realized that the new technology could be marketed not simply as a way to transfer cargo and ordnance but as a privileged experience. “Service on the European airlines was courteous and efficient,” Alastair Gordon explains in his excellent cultural history of the industry, “The Naked Airport” (2004). The passages were expensive (plane tickets in the twenties cost up to fifty per cent more than first-class fares on trains and ocean liners), yet the trips could not be called luxurious. Cabins were as temperate as a meat freezer, and skull-numbingly loud. The first commercial “flight” from New York to Los Angeles, in 1929, was a forty-eight-hour purgatory of intermingled train and air time, the better to avoid flying at night, which early travellers were reluctant to do. Gordon quotes one passenger’s description of the mood in boarding areas: “Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine was a bluebird for happiness in comparison.”
What held the industry together was the new rhythm of contact it allowed. Cecelia Brady, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon,” describes “that sharp rip between coast and coast” by talking about a feeling of “lingering—and not quite on purpose.” The paradox of lingering across the rip characterizes flight, and, particularly in Europe, it brought progressive changes. “Aviation drew a new kind of political map,” Gordon writes. “European borders became more fluid.” Territories that, for centuries, had been contiguous, local, and tribal were now a giant game of hopscotch. The Continent became a network of metropolitan capitals.
Proust had anticipated the effects of the change a few years earlier. The narrator of “In Search of Lost Time,” while riding on horseback through the woods, sees, for the first time, a pilot soaring overhead, and immediately bursts into tears: “I felt that there lay open before him—before me, had not habit made me a prisoner—all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction that was the reverse of gravity, as though returning to his native element.” Proust’s genius was to recognize that the shock of flight wasn’t technological but intellectual; he captures the true heartbreak of mortality, not the knowledge that the world continues on without us but a realization that the human mind—its quests and frontiers—flies on, too. The airborne class and those who brushed against it came to represent what we might call “encounter thought”: a way of processing the world which grew from easy geographic leaps and happenstantial connections.
This fresh kind of encounter indulged the bonds underlying the sociologist Mark S. Granovetter’s influential claim, from 1973, that “weak ties”—people you sort of know—extend farther and more consequentially than strong-tie networks, such as those made up of your family and friends. In the Kipling era, adventurers were largely leathery rusticators and frontierspeople. In the world of air travel, they could be cosmopolitans and professionals: business executives, fur-clad film types, journalists, dealmaking lawyers, wealthy hobbyists—people we might now think of as standard-bearers of the information economy. By the thirties, developing airports had become a cause for people who believed that urbanism, and the social encounters it nurtured, defined the vectors of the future.
One of those people was Fiorello LaGuardia, who became the mayor of New York in 1934. At the time, Newark’s airport was the most advanced in the area: it had pioneered air-traffic control by radio, allowing densely coördinated takeoffs and landings, and become the unofficial hub for New York City. This drove LaGuardia crazy. (“Newark,” he snapped, “is not New York.”) Once, after landing in New Jersey on a New York ticket, Gordon tells us, he refused to deplane until the crew flew the hop to New York’s own, extremely shabby airfield, on the far edge of Brooklyn—a long and traffic-choked drive from Manhattan. LaGuardia followed up on the episode by wrangling twenty-seven million dollars from the federal government and using most of it to dump trash and dirt onto the marshlands at Flushing Bay, a site he’d chosen for a new and grander field. The press called the venture “LaGuardia’s folly,” and the attribution stuck even as popular sentiment about it warmed—or didn’t. Reviewing the airport in this magazine, in 1939, Lewis Mumford described it as “a series of bungles.” He wrote, “People who can spoil their opportunities to enjoy the meeting of land, water, and sky obviously don’t deserve anything better than [this] bombproof shelter.” Present-day LaGuardia travellers can decide whether his judgment stands.
By the time Mayor LaGuardia left office, in 1946, a second field, then called Idlewild, was being built on Jamaica Bay, to accommodate the overflow from his eponymous airport. The new structure was bigger, as it needed to be able to dock nearly a hundred planes: mainstream air travel, like so much in postwar America, would arrive with great ambition, and in bulk.
“Once I get you up there, where the air is rarefied”; “From Russia with love, I fly to you.” By the early sixties, jet travel was carrying a poetic dream as surely as the railroad had a century earlier—and just a little more, because a jet, exceeding Kipling’s vision, could make any global journey in the span of a day. The new planes were largely impervious to weather. They could cross the U.S. in a morning and the Atlantic between dinner and the next day’s breakfast. They offered luxury of a quality that freezing, fear-addled fliers in the twenties scarcely imagined.
“Jet” became in the sixties what “cyber” or “Web” was to a later decade: a prefix that could furnish anything with a cool gleam of futurism. George Jetson appeared in 1962. “Jet lag,” an affliction of the well travelled, first showed up in print in 1965; “jet-setting” grew synonymous with chic. John F. Kennedy was the first President to make a jet the symbol of Air Force One, and it’s debatable which of them, the man or the plane, got the greater image boost from the upgrade. Gordon describes the jet world’s glamour on his first visit to Eero Saarinen’s Idlewild (recently renamed Kennedy) complex, in 1964, when he was twelve. “Pilots stepped through pools of milky light,” he writes. “Beautiful stewardesses trailed behind them wearing trim red outfits and perfectly straight stocking seams. The ambient lighting, the flirtatious smiles, the lipstick-red carpet and uniforms, the cushioned benches and steel railings curving around the mezzanine—all conspired on the senses.”
This was the “golden age” for which Schaberg is so nostalgic. Big airports were accessible, luxurious, masculine, feminine, businesslike, unbusinesslike—most things to most people. The sixties brought America’s strongest contributions to air travel since the Wright brothers, in part because a widely travelled public was thought to wield cultural power. (The congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce said, “American postwar aviation policy is simple: we want to fly everywhere.”) If the cultural legacy of the Eisenhower years had been mostly domestic, articulated through the interstate highway system, the Kennedy and Johnson years set aloft a war of soft imperialism almost overshadowing the harder kind.
And because jet travel was a technology that connected the domestic-luxury sphere with the world of professional adventure, a rising generation of women used it to sidestep into new roles. Gloria Steinem calls her recent memoir “My Life on the Road,” but she never learned to drive; she got around largely on planes. Joan Didion, a student of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and a steel-edged bricoleur of upper-middle-class fantasy, wrote obsessively of flights and hotels. Today, the New Journalism is often misremembered as a formal innovation, a convergence of novelistic reporting and voice-driven subjectivity. But these narrative techniques had been in use for decades, in magazines such as this one; what made the New Journalism new was its vigor as a literary life-style movement, based largely on the idea that professional process—the getting there, the rips between the coasts—was part of the essential story, too. When Kennedy first appears in Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (1960), the Senator is arriving from the airport, and the writer is getting his bearings after being jolted from New York to Los Angeles. Mailer goes on to describe the candidate’s female supporters as the type who “worked for a year as an airline hostess before marrying well.” The kind of thought that came with flight shaped a new standard of sophistication and, within a certain generation, new problems to be parsed and performed:
That is Jacques Derrida, in the last sentence of a 1984 lecture on “Ulysses”—specifically, exploring the way its author uses the word “yes” to mark an elaborate negotiation between self-identity and a path of interaction through the world. Joyce, writing in Paris, had hounded his aunt for newspaper clippings from Dublin. It was an exceptional thing to do. By the time the book was canonic, though, such leaps of identity across space and memory were the new habits of mind.
Writers and travellers alike do their best work when they don’t know what they’re looking for; disorientation requires problem-solving, and a new landscape holds secrets still. These days, I never totally unpack my suitcase. I buy only folding toothbrushes. I leave, often, on short notice—my record is three and a half hours before takeoff, for a transatlantic trip—and I like my mind best when it’s on the move. To land somewhere unfamiliar is to force yourself into alertness, to redraw whatever maps you have, to set the stage for creativity more than mere pattern-matching productivity. I sometimes think I love the gentle, kneeling left turn planes make after rising from the Kennedy runway more than I love New York itself.
Like many frequent fliers, though, I claim to find advantage in basic routine. I know to book a window seat on red-eyes and an aisle in the daytime. I can explain why a 7 a.m. departure from New York is the best flight to California, what snack is safest in Delta’s lounge, and which seat is usually the first out. (It’s not in first class.) I can mimic the progression of cabin pings and flap extensions that announce the landing sequence in a Boeing, or the hydraulic bark of an Airbus. These skills have narrow applications, but, then, so does C.P.R. Their goal is to avert the interminable lines and vanished hours that seem, at times, maybe a little worse than death.
Walter Kirn caricatured these anxieties in his 2001 novel, “Up in the Air.” “I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style,” his jet-setting narrator, Ryan Bingham, says. “Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency—the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars.” Fifty years ago, Bingham would have scanned as a dynamic hero. By the time the novel appeared, he was a schlubby man-child, a guy who flies because he cannot deal with life on the ground.
What happened? One theory holds that the new air travel, anodyne and hollow, is part of a more general mainstreaming of rare experience. Flying used to be special, but now it’s just a thing we do, and the market has responded accordingly. As Schaberg puts it, “Distinct aspects of airports (including high demand for entertainment, feelings of ‘dead time,’ anxieties about contingencies) have anticipated and helped to pave the way for a host of newer experiences that are more about on-demand mediation and information (and capital) flows—and less about human bodies actually going places.” We’re unamazed by flight, so we numb ourselves to its trials by blending it into the noise of every-day commerce. The privileges of Airworld recede further. (Witness the Buy Your Own Damn Sandwich phenomenon in coach.) Several airlines have responded by trying to make the high end of the market extra-special. Flying in first class on Emirates, you have access to an onboard shower—just in case the idea of being naked on a wet surface during turbulence sounds fun.
This would seem to be part of a bigger shift in aviation commerce. Airports used to run off landing and lease fees. Now they rely equally on retail to keep the lights on. Most of us can tell. An airport is among the most challenging structures to design—the architectural equivalent of a fugue—partly because movement in it is both various and constrained. International arrivals cannot mix with domestic until they’ve gone through immigration. Baggage handling should be neither seen nor heard, though it’s the vastest operation of all. The global range of airports chiefly displays different theories about how to sell.
In the nineties, this meant a turn toward single-terminal airports: Denver, Hong Kong, London’s Stansted. Funnelling everyone through one giant terminal focussed retail. It encouraged flagship restaurants, and it worked well with the growing hub system, which required transfers. More recently, the emphasis has been on hybridized volume and variety. Airports are now malls. Increasingly (and desperately), they’re casinos. Derek Moore, the director of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and an architect who has designed airports for twenty-five years, says that the most ambitious sites in progress, such as Dubai, are anticipating passenger flows exceeding a hundred million a year—more than any currently operational airport sees. None of these new mega-airports are American. “The U.S. carriers are not leaders in service standards. They’re not even followers,” Moore, many of whose recent projects have been in India, says. Airports, designed for the complex interaction of specific processes, are inherently prone to obsolescence. Pilots for some U.S. carriers have complained of wild drops in salary and disappearing pensions. Asking what happened to the golden age of air travel, then, is to ask the wrong question: India, the United Arab Emirates, and China have great eras coming, bigger and more majestic than T.W.A. in 1964. We should ask what happened to our golden age.
The turn is more than infrastructural. At the peak of their glory, American airports were temples for encounter thought. Since September, 2001, they have become something else—theatres where mediated information sources build a story about menace and protection, commerce and control. The end of our golden age of air travel partly heralds the natural life span of a mechanical technology—and an environmentally unsound one, too. But, as Schaberg points out, it also marks a shift in how we navigate a globalized world.
When physical travel cedes to digital exploration, a certain style of discovery falls away. You can explore on your phone; you can explore on the Web. You can stumble on fascinating things. The Internet is a vast, interactive museum engineered by curators and augmented by other visitors’ preferences. Look at this! it says. Click here! Come down this passageway! It lacks physical constraints, but also circumstantial contiguities; all points of passage through it have to be, in some sense, primed. You cannot casually ask about the background image of a Web page and be directed to a secret circus a short walk from where you stand. The stories you uncover through your smartphone are stories, basically, asking to be found.
Getting outside the museum is hard. There is a moment in “The Big Short,” the new film based on Michael Lewis’s reporting on the mortgage crisis, in which Steve Carell’s character, a querulous hedge-fund manager, wants to figure out whether to bet against the market. It is 2007. The wisest analysts in New York and Washington are sanguine. He gets on a plane, flies to Florida, and meets some people on whose mortgages the market rides. He finds abandoned houses, loans for the unemployed, and a pole dancer who owns many homes. Encounter thinking, our response to the exceptional, saves us from the errors of consensus and the expectations of smooth process that, like myths of consolation, leave us ill-equipped to deal with changes when they come.
The worst air logistics I’ve ever encountered were en route to a reporting assignment in Monaco—a destination with a gloss of antiquated glamour foreign to me, and a project that suggested I’d been dropped into another traveller’s life. I was flying from New York to Nice, through London. It was mid-May, and, at some point during my trip over the Atlantic, the French went on strike. My transfer flight was cancelled. I got rebooked on a different airline, transferring through Madrid that afternoon. In Spain, the connection was cancelled, too. I was told that I could fly to Lisbon, for a new transfer; I’d just have to get my bag, which, for some Mediterranean reason, required sneaking back through a no-entry security door. By that point, I had been in Airworld for more than fifteen hours. I hadn’t slept since the previous morning. My laptop was out of power, and so I sat on the floor of the empty, fluorescent-lit baggage-claim area, tethered to an outlet in the wall, awaiting a suitcase that might never appear and a new flight leading farther in the wrong direction. I did not feel lucky.
We landed in Lisbon at sunset. The light was Cognac-colored, and there was a soft wind off the water. On the tarmac, a flight attendant held a passenger’s infant, and the breeze stirred her skirt and the swaddling of the baby in her arms: Madonna and child. To my surprise, the flight to Nice took off, not long after midnight, with me on it. The airplane was a freezing Fokker so small that I was told to change my seat because the engines often made it shake. At 2 a.m., some twenty-six hours after I’d left New York, we touched down at the Nice airport, which seemed deserted. Outside, among the palms, I met a driver with a black Mercedes; French taxis were striking, he said. We set off.
Because it was so late, the tunnels through the coastal cliffs were closed, and so we took the old route—up and over, winding past small hillside homes and down the Route de Menton, in La Turbie. “Look at that,” the driver said. The road had forked again. To our right, the hills fell away, revealing a full moon. The Mediterranean gaped beneath it, wide and textured like the skin of an old person’s cheek. I rolled the window down, certain that I was watching something people were not supposed to see: the world undressing itself, changing color, wiping off its makeup with a moonlight-hued layer of cream. A breeze came up, jasmine and silk trees, and we followed it down toward the water. Every switchback offered a new view. I arrived at my destination and reported my piece, but, when I think of that week, what’s sharpest in my memory is the slow sunset descent to Portugal, the woman cradling a baby whom she did not know, the brightness of the moon on the sea long past midnight. Anyway, it was better than the fast flight home. ♦