FRIDAY 🛫
As a belated birthday present, Sanaë took me out to spend Friday night at the new TWA Hotel at Kennedy Airport. (Asides: Kennedy is how my grandparents call it, instead of JFK, and I like it a lot that way.) Our destination was a surprise until the day of: Sanaë told me to pack an overnight bag with a bathing suit, and instructed me not to open the little card she gave me till 3:30pm.
This is definitely the first time I head to the airport with no intention of taking off!
As an extra treat, I rented a Fuji XT-3 mirrorless camera for the weekend. I'm thinking of purchasing one ahead of our trip to Japan in October, and this was the perfect excuse to try it out.
Our journey, as usual, started with the Airtrain. But then at the JetBlue terminal, something unexpected happens. The elevator looks like any old airport elevator. But somehow between the two floors, we turned the clock back some. Or at the very least, the playlist!
The first thing I'm reminded of when I step into the Trans World Flight Center, designed by Eero Saarinen and inaugurated in 1962, is the Jetsons. Which happened to also launch in 1962. I've never seen concrete flow this way. Everything feels airy, open, light, full of possibility; the shapes are soft, the concrete is warm. It feels like an alternate Dr. Seuss universe, less fuzzy, more futuristic! It's hard not to feel swept up into the fantasy that was 1960s air travel—or that the airline brochures would have you believe it was. (This Fast Co article was an interesting reality check on how, in addition to being glamorous, air travel was also dangerous, expensive, sexist, and racist. And boozy, but we knew that.)
The flight ticker board shows the original airline logos.
Sanaë got us a room facing directly onto the tarmac. When we arrived, there were three A380s at the ready. What a sight! The TWA branding is on point, and the in-room minibar is worthy of 1960s-era air travel.
Outside the terminal, an incredibly restored Lockheed Constellation has been turned into a bar. I was fascinated to discover the little porthole window in the ceiling behind the cockpit. It was apparently used by the crew, sextant in hand, to navigate with the stars the way ships have done it for centuries.
The bar is a hit with retired pilots. We met a former TWA pilot who earned his stripes on the Boeing 747. I hope I didn't offend him when I asked if he flew the Constellation. He laughed and said that that was before his time. I wonder if pilots on a 747 cockpit ever climb the stairs to the 2nd floor, and ask the passengers not to mind them while they open the sunroof and take down some measurements. Nobody wants to end up at Logan when they expected to arrive at Laguardia!
I asked around for memories of what it was like catching a flight in this terminal. The photos bring dad back to his first trips to the US. They used to layover in New York when flying to and from Dayton, Ohio, where mom and him lived for a few years in the 80s. They flew in Boeing 707s. Grandpa doesn't remember the TWA terminal, but does recall Constellations and Super Constellations. He mentioned that back then, airlines had witty nicknames. TWA was "Two weeks after"—I guess they had a bad rep for tardiness. Air France was "Air Chance."
The wild thing about the TWA terminal is that it was meticulously designed to accommodate Constellations and its brethren like the DC-6, with their 60-100 passengers. Just six years after the terminal opened, Boeing launched the 747, hosting 400 to 600 travelers. In other words, the terminal was basically obsolete by the time it opened. Still, it remained open till 2001.
After our exhausting travels, Sanaë and I retired to watch Catch me if you can, which is only appropriate.
SATURDAY 🛬
Breakfast of champions. In the 1960s, there were no good fats and bad fats. Just growing boys.
If you're wondering: Yes, it smells like jet fuel up here.
There's a real cognitive dissonance between all this globetrotting glamour and our creeping acceptance of the long term carbon impact of all this insouciance. An A380 gets 74 miles miles per gallon per passenger. The 737 Max 8 (yes, that 737 Max!) gets 110 mpg per passenger. One way to look at it is to observe that modern jets gets significantly better mileage than a Prius. Of course, that's a little misleading. If you were able to travel to London and back for a weekend getaway in your Prius, that wouldn't be so good for our carbon stocks either. The plane's fuel economy isn't really what's at issue here. Instead, the issue is the Pandora's Box that accessible commercial flight opened for us: that is, the ability to propel our bodies vast distances in an instant, in a reasonably safe and acceptably comfortable fashion. Sipping a cocktail in an infinity pool while looking at a jumbo jet miraculously become airborne with 800 passengers and 82,000 gallons of fuel on board, it seems only fair that a waft of that same fuel should serve as an unwelcome reminder that flying the way we do—the way I do—is ludicrous. No amount of TWA branding or Beach Boys soundtrack can change that.
Back in Brooklyn...
