In the Place of the Public...

Airports are set apart from every other form of mass transport terminals in that it severs the actual experience of its space while providing another form of experience altogether. In the airport and the aircraft an individual is emotionally detached from his or her environment. The experience of air travel, much like being within a virtual reality chamber, is completely devoid of any active engagement with the space. Here, the analogy of the flight simulator programs used by pilots becomes relevent. It is because the implications and the reality behind air travel is extremely complicated and involves such great risk that it is necessary to mask this through the simplification of environmental cues and diversions from the actual event, hence, a simulated experience for pilots and for the passengers.
On the pilots’ end, the usefulness of flight simulator programs (veritable video games) becomes relevant when you think of just how much responsibility is in hands of the pilot. So in order to eliminate the possibility of human error through emotional anxiety, pilots are desensitized from the actual event of flying. They are placed in a simulated environment, a tiny pod completely shielded from the rest of the plane (just the pilot, an array of controls and the sky), much like the environment they experienced while using the flight simulator.

On the passenger’s end, people are strapped into a confined space, like canned sardines, supplied with diversions simulating the habitual comforts of being at home (constant catering from attendants, in-flight movies), one quickly forgets that they are leaving their lives in the hands of strangers and impersonal machinery (that is subject to human and mechanical error).

Privatization of public terminals:

The experience of the airport terminal provides a different kind of experience, one that arises out of purely operational intentions.

The airport is a multi-functional, multi-dimensional system whose overriding concern is operational. Everything about the airport seems to connote a completely stripped down, separation from the actual experience of ‘flying’. Unlike other modes of mass transport (i.e train and ship travel) airplanes are kept hidden from public view, the traditional grandiose entrance of entering onto a great vessel is withheld from the passenger as they are fed through impersonal, sensory deprivation hallways that seem to deny the entrance onto a different plane of existence (did we even leave the ground? The airport terminal?). From the point of entry into the terminal to the time of landing, the passenger is shielded from the reality of this form of travel, led to believe that they are not actually in the air flying. Like watching a program on T.V. that experience is always kept as a secondary experience to the constructed diversions put in place.