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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Lord of the Flies" meets MTV's "Beach House": The expert takes a look at ABC's plane-crash survivor farce "Lost."
Nov 24, 2004 | It's Thanksgiving again, always a momentous holiday for airline crew members and passengers alike. Momentous for crews because most of them have to work, while for all parties it's the single busiest travel push of the year, a four-day weekend of overbooked cabins and half-hour waits at the Cinnabon counter. According to the Air Transport Association, a record 16.3 million Americans will embark on a journey by plane this holiday, up 2.5 percent from last year.
Sixteen million is a lot of people crammed into four days, and some lousy weather could really gum things up. Not to set a discouraging tone, but keep a step ahead by checking out the Budget Traveller's Guide to Sleeping in Airports, an online site that ranks and evaluates the best and worst terminals in which to cop a nap. The site lists London; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Singapore; Frankfurt, Germany; and Bangkok, Thailand, as the most popular hubs for sleeping (the word "crashing" is so tempting there), with our own LAX, JFK and O'Hare in the top 10.
For airport authorities a high score is a dubious blessing, maybe, but some will take it in stride. Even in perfect weather the populations of certain airports are known to swell markedly in the wee hours, a fact obvious to anybody who has passed through Bangkok's Don Muang International at 2 a.m. Thanks to an odd mix of midnight arrivals and early morning departures, BKK has more people sprawled across its floors than all the mosques of Arabia at evening prayer. (Missing from the site's evaluations are the parking lot of Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta International, and the grassy embankment in front of the main hall at Papeete, Tahiti. But those are stories for another time.)
Making a stressful situation worse is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), this year promising greater than normal numbers of passengers called aside for "additional screening." Says Rear Adm. David Stone, TSA's assistant secretary of homeland security: "A vigilant America may well have discouraged terrorist acts tied to high-profile events like the recent political conventions and the election. The holidays also are a period when increased vigilance is especially appropriate."
If you say so, Rear Admiral. The infernal kabuki of airside security has been beaten to death on these pages, and readers are hereby spared another tirade, but it's worth noting that more than three years after You Know What, the concourse screening rigmarole remains a circus of sneaker checks and pointless pat-downs. So keep your shoes loose and your sharps at home.
If you're still one of the not-so-few Americans dumb enough to saunter through the metal detector with your Leatherman tool, army knife or ceremonial dagger, a company called CheckPoint Mailers is there to help. CheckPoint, headquartered in North Carolina, has set up mailbox-style drop units at 15 airports around the country, and for $8 per item will ship your contraband home. A helpful service for those whose expensive or sentimentally valuable items would be otherwise vanquished to the TSA scrap heap. Sherry Anderson is one of the owners of CheckPoint, and says she got the idea not long after Sept. 11. "A valuable item of mine had been confiscated," she explains, "and I couldn't get it back. The same thing was happening to thousands of people, and the idea seemed a natural." And they say the American entrepreneurial spirit is dead. Nonsense and hysteria are the mothers of invention.
Wherever you end up this week -- delivered on time to your in-laws in Denver, or asleep under a bench at BWI with a half-eaten Chick-fil-A sandwich in your pocket, one thing you won't have to worry about is missing the latest installment of "Lost," ABC's popular ongoing series about a group of plane crash survivors trapped on a mysterious Pacific island. "Lost" runs prime time on Wednesdays but is taking the week off, returning Dec. 1.
