Green is good, air travel is terrible
1928 poster
Terminal lobby at Rhode Island’s Green Airport
— Photo by Antony-22
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“Once I get you up there, where the air is rarefied
We'll just glide, starry-eyed
Once I get you up there, I'll be holding you so near
You may hear all angels cheer because we're together.’’
-- From the 1958 song “Come Fly With Me,’’ with music by Jimmy Van Heusen (1913-1990) and lyrics by Sammy Cahn (1913-1993). Song was pre-airline deregulation!
Kudos to the folks at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport, which keeps getting honored, for being ranked by Travel + Leisure magazine as second-best airport in America (after Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (“Minnesota nice’’? Sometimes.).
Green gets high marks for being, for an airport, low-key and (relatively) low stress, in part because it’s so easy to navigate. God knows that many, probably most, medium and large airports have become stress centers, serving up a mix of anxiety, anger, boredom, confusion.
Airports have become so unpleasant because of the law of unintended consequences. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 removed federal control over fares, routes and encouraged entry of new airlines (most of which have since disappeared). That brought “the masses” into a sector whose customers had previously been mostly businesspeople and the affluent. And the nation’s population has increased from about 225 million in 1979 to about 340 million now – a hell of a lot more potential airline passengers.
Deregulation led to the fearsome hub-and-spoke system, based on using a few major airports as central connecting points, which increased passenger loads, intensified airport and air traffic congestion and eliminated many convenient nonstop flights. And if one airline dominates a hub, the lack of competition has often led to higher fares. Not exactly what the deregulators had in mind.
Another bad thing that came out of airline deregulation was that it led to the closing of airports serving small cities.
On top of that, there’s the mystery, to me, of so many Americans’ masochistic and lemming-like tendency to want to travel at the same times, which leads many people to spend as much as half the time or more on a trip amidst the hordes at airports and highways rather than at their sought destinations.
Anyway, at least the planes (even Boeing’s!) are safer these days. Think of that as you wait in lines for hours as your flights keep getting cancelled because of, say, a thunderstorm in Chicago.
One nice thing about airports, however awful they can be: They still have newsstands, which used to be everywhere but have rapidly gone away in other public places, especially since COVID erupted.