Airport | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Jan 04 2020

New Year’s adventures in Germany – Flughafen München-Bad Bergzabern-Straubing-Flughafen München.

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Autobahn.

I’ve not been in a car this much ever, Munich Airport to Bad Bergzabern to Straubing to Munich Airport, a goodbye to the 2010s in a most chilly and mostly plastered Deutschland, with a soundtrack of the decade’s tackiest pop hits.

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Bad Bergzabern in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate took in the delights of this wooden bad boy, which I presume was an observation tower to view troop movements as its vistas overlook the border with France. I climbed up the fucker and left a wee mention at the top, carving ‘Nuuuuu’ into the floor with a pocket knife. I am very proud of that. One day some random will scratch their head at the … ‘word’ and then hit Google. A lovely wee town, it even had a heaving club which was visited just after midnight, where locals sparked up inside. Flashbacks kicked in to a pre-2006 Edinburgh when you could smoke a cigar and not get chased off the premises by their interior ministry.

Midnight fireworks.

Straubing – not a lot happened in Straubing. I did my usual morning run/descent into death followed by a supermarket jaunt, and rounded off proceedings by watching Dragons’ Den clips for three hours off a tablet, contemplating the decade ahead and hoping that one day folk in airports will just fucking learn how to distinguish between the arrivals and departures screens (this also applies to the denizens of train stations).

Freezing run action in this park.

Goodies.

Other delicacies included the outrageous wearing of Crocs and the sighting of that ‘big pile of shit’ from Jurassic Park (1993).

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All in all, quite the splendid wee trip. A civilised affair (for once).

Tagged Airport, Autobahn, Bad Bergzabern, Bavaria, Crocs, Fireworks, France, Germany, Holiday, New Year, Transport, Travel

Aug 19 2019

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Air travel, Documentary, Planes, Tourism, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

Airport meltdowns.

I was verily addicted to this show-stopper back in the day. EasyJet, Stelios, staff who couldn’t give a fuck about enforced politeness, wannabe passengers who are so stupid you wonder how they managed to emerge from bed without causing nuclear fallout. There’s something about airports that brings out the inner tosspot in the human species. It’s a sociologist’s paradise, as John Cooper Clarke would have put it.

Tagged Air travel, Airport, Easyjet, Flights, Flying, Jet, Planes, Travel

Mar 02 2019

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Air travel, Planes, Technology, Tourism, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

Airport security pre 9/11.

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Waiting at the gate is an exploit I remember from that Friends episode (“The One with Ross’s New Girlfriend”, 1995) when Rachel – peak Jennifer Aniston with flowers in hand – waits for Ross returning from China, only for him to emerge with a new missus. Much like the whimsical innocence of mid-’90s sitcoms, we’ll never see such things in an airport again.

Looking at pre-9/11 airports is as if being confronted with an alien entity – the lax rules, the laissez-faire atmosphere of the buildings, the … freedom of the places. I flew on about seven flights prior to September 11, and even as a teenager I recall the airport endeavour was a doddle, much like crucifixion in the Python cinematic universe. It explains the success of the hijackers, especially when you consider box cutters and small knives were permitted on certain aircraft at the time.

I don’t think anyone with a modicum of concern for their own or another’s safety is bothered about making the ‘sacrifices’ of conforming to post-9/11 air travel rules. No bottle of Volvic allowed from outside the airport? Diddums. It’s a small price to pay.

The awfulness stems from interaction with passengers who are thick as fuck, and these are voluminous. Airports appear to be a breeding ground for the bottom-rung IQ scale of the general public. I’m talking about fuckers who line up at the conveyor belt oblivious to the omniscient signs on display indicating the liquid prohibitions, clowns who try and smuggle Prosecco on board, the haughty lot who protest at taking their shoes off, the numpties who insist on walking through the metal detector with a pocket full of shrapnel.

They are the real pain in the arse.

Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt – the Neverending Story.

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This airport – with carriers Easyjet, Germanwings, and Lufthansa set to dominate the runways – is now apparently meant to be operating in 2022, though this deadline changes every month. German so-called efficiency is down the pan with this mishap; construction started in 2006 when I had just emerged from Blue WKDs. It’s almost as if the nostalgia-afflicted aficionados for Schönefeld Airport and its GDR connotations have sabotaged the project, and Willy Brandt isn’t exactly a cool name (much unlike the rather dapper statesman).

Berlin

Trying to understand the myriad fuck-ups that can afflict a bunch of runways (this place was meant to have opened in 2011) is more difficult, I imagine, than Forrest Gump attempting a Will Hunting equation on a Fisher-Price calculator. Berlin is a beastly, glorious experience, however, so I can’t wait to wander around this airport in an attempt to pap a midget clutching a miniature bottle of Jägermeister.

Tenzing–Hillary Airport.

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An (alleged) airport a snail-crawling 25 miles from Mount Everest, with no radar system and entirely comprising a single 500-metre runway built into a cliff, I read that Sir Edmund Hillary himself oversaw its construction and that locals were ploughed with liquor (no one will reveal what kind) and asked to perform a ‘foot-stomping dance’ to flatten the soil and make it suitable for landing. I can picture the whole endeavour as a garish episode lifted from a peak Werner Herzog movie, with a Klaus Kinski Svengali lording over the ‘indigenous’, the martinet a grizzly Bavarian launching battered shoes and Jägermeister at them. This shockingly isn’t an apocryphal story, and the airport, a.k.a. ‘It’s a Trap’, was only paved in 2001.

It’s an appropriate precursor to an attempted scaling of Everest. The danger aspect would overwhelm this fat bastard and inject hubris into proceedings – “If I survive this landing the worst is over and I can surely surmount the beastly mountain.”

The list of accidents on the Wikipedia entry is a most disconcerting read, and I wouldn’t recommend watching one of the many bumpy landings should an upcoming flight be on the cards. Fuck knows how a plastered Denzel would have coped. As a passenger, I’d be stammering out of my mind on crystal meth birthed from Walter White’s RV just to endure the experience.

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Tag Archives: Airport