Thoughts from the Airport
I’m sitting in SAT right now, and now is the perfect time to make random observations about airports:
- Southwest airlines has started lining up people by letter and number. Organizing customers by more than just groups makes sense in their ruthless drive for efficiency. Loading customers onto the airplane is very much a delicate science, but many of the approaches are quite fascinating.
- SAT now features dozens of power stations spread throughout the airport. You can sit down, plug in your laptop and recharge right away.
- My work issued Blackberry does Bluetooth dial-up networking. That means that all I need to do is have it somewhere near my laptop, and I can dial up an Internet connection. I actually think the Blackberry is a rather middling cell phone (the iPhone leaves it in the dust in almost every way but messaging), but this feature is killer.
- Is there a great conspiracy that only a certain variety of restaurants are allowed in airports? It’s an American truth: McDonald’s, Blimpies, Sbarro, and maybe some little local place. Are these the only restaurants operationally capable of sustaining an airport business?
And now my late flight has arrived and is disgorging its passengers. Time to go find my place among the numbered pillars.
The one mistake SWA made was assuming that people would be willing to talk to each other enough to line up in numerical order. Seems to end up w/ little clumps of 5 people near each of the pillars.
Still a big improvement.
What the heck is it supposed to accomplish when there is no assigned seating?
Preventing people from lining up an hr before their flights and clogging up the gate areas.