Photo: This Seems Strangely Familiar

While on my way to LoneStarCon 3 last week I had to change planes in Chicago, since there are no direct Toronto-San Antonio flights since that would be ridiculous. It did give me a brief chance to wander through part of O'Hare Airport between spells of cramming myself into a pressurized tube kilometers above the ground, at least. While there I encountered this skylit corridor that was oddly familiar--having had a chance to consider it, I think they may have done some filming here for Home Alone 2.

Though I can't help but notice the thematic qualities of the place as well. Notice all the national flags along the arcade; also notice the American flag that takes a place of prominence at the far end, which is mirrored on the other side. Interesting.

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Photo: Pushing Off, Pouring Down

I recently had cause to sit around in Ottawa's airport, waiting for a flight to bring me back to Toronto--a day before last month's floods, incidentally, so in retrospect I'm glad I was able to come back when I did. The conditions in Ottawa certainly foreshadowed what would hit Toronto the next day, with constant grey rain--nevertheless, the planes must still go in and out. Here, a Porter Airlines Q400 is pushed away from the terminal, and I have to wonder if the ground crew is being paid enough to put up with it all.

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Hello, Passengers, We're Listening

Some folks are naturally suspicious of government, and thereby primed to react strongly whenever it suggests an action they disapprove of. Take the example of the United States, where a general distrust of the government is one of the unifying factors of the modern right wing. While it's wise not to take anything a government says at face value with no critical analysis, it's equally wise to do the same for everything; in many respects, for-profit corporations have far more incentive to do things worthy of suspicion than do governments.

In Canada, that anti-government suspicion has been surfacing in fits and starts over the last year, ever since Stephen Harper got his majority and decided it was time to show Canadians what happens when the Conservatives have no checks on their power - for the record, what happens is along the lines of "fuck you, we're doing this anyway." The petulant refusal of the Conservatives to even consider breaking up their omnibus budget bill last week, the robotic party discipline which fuels the flames that lick at Canadian democracy... what, I ask, are they trying to hide from us? That is the sort of thing we should be focused on, the sort of thing we should hold the government to account over, the sort of thing we should make sure that we do not forget.

When it comes to this sort of situation, it's all about picking battles... but some people are so fired up that they want to pick them all.

Recently, the Canada Border Services Agency stated that it is working toward the installation of HD cameras and microphones capable of "[eavesdropping] on travellers' conversations." It didn't take long for this news to spread across the internet; Boing Boing pointed to it with the delightfully unbiased headline "Canadian government wants to fill airports with KGB-style hidden microphones." I've seen others react with surprise at the announcement... surprise that this wasn't already being done. I mean, these are airports we're talking about; places where my mom instructed me to never so much as utter the word "bomb" in any context whatsoever. To be honest, I was a bit surprised this wasn't already going on myself.

To be really honest, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over this.

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Please repeat your threat in the direction of the microphone."

I understand that when a government agency suggests surveillance, opposition is the appropriate automatic reaction; otherwise, democracy would probably last about half an hour. But we can't just build our policies and our outlooks based on automatic responses. This is not Nineteen Eighty-Four; this is not even close to it. Nobody's installing telescreens in our homes, nobody's wiring up public squares for audio/video monitoring, no one's tagging dissidents or making them disappear. These are, realistically, airports - places where something like eighty-seven percent of all the conversations these microphones could capture would deal with how some Air Canada flight is delayed yet again, or Air Canada lost someone's luggage, or that Air Canada is expensive and sucks.

They are, traditionally, not places that are vital to free expression. Airports are not public squares, and there wasn't any "Occupy LaGuardia" or "Occupy YVR" last year. Unless you work there, if you're there for more than a couple of hours than either you've gone through security really early, or Air Canada is delaying your flight by five hours. If this was something different, something more wide-ranging like banning all usage of photography or recording devices in airports, that would be a serious affront to our rights and cause for pushback; after all, that sort of law would have allowed the RCMP to sweep the circumstances regarding the death of Robert Dziekanski right under the rug.

Really, it's the idea of the slippery slope that has so many people fired up, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if Boing Boing's rather hyperbolic headline is at least partially motivated by that; Cory Doctorow, though originally from Canada, now lives in the United Kingdom and is well aware of what a surveillance state is like, and a UK-style ubiquitous CCTV setup should absolutely be prevented from being built in Canada.

The important thing is to pick one's battles. There are a lot of people who won't get worked up about this sort of surveillance in airports, who wouldn't see anything wrong with it, who would look at the people closing ranks against it and wonder what their problem is. Raising awareness about this kind of surveillance in airports is always a good thing, but unless it threatens to go beyond the airport... there are plenty of battles to be fought, and choosing the wrong ones only weakens the whole.

Photo: Unfreezing the Wing

There was a slight delay on the ground when I found myself flying to New Brunswick in November; after all, even in Vancouver it tends to get cold in winter, and to make sure the ailerons didn't freeze up during the middle of the flight and so on, YVR ran the plane through de-icing before we were allowed to leave. It's the first time I've had the chance to see it in operation, spraying deicing fluid down.


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Photo: Fly By Night

Forget what I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how Air Canada doesn't run a flight monopoly - in some cities, this actually is the case. Case in point: Fredericton International Airport in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where all regularly scheduled flights are run by Air Canada Express, connecting it to Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. I was through there this weekend, arriving and departing in the deep darkness. Pictured here is C-FFJA, a CRJ200 regional jet that ran the 5:30 AM flight to Toronto Pearson, the airport's first flight of the day - and aside from a completely dark Dash 8 at the other end of the field, it was the sole and solitary aircraft there.

Been a while since I've boarded a plane without going by jetway.

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Photo: There From Almost Everywhere

There are some cities that it seems everyone wants to go to, and one way to tell is to look at the airlines that fly into its airport. Los Angeles International Airport is one such place; it's the fifth-busiest in the world, and planes fly there from every continent in the world except Africa and Antarctica. When I left there in December 2009, I managed to take this shot during the early stages of takeoff that shows the variety of airlines that drop their wheels at LAX; from the left there are planes from TACA Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, EVA Air, and Air Tahiti Nui - that last one is an uncommon find, since LAX is the only place in North and South America where it lands. As for the last one, the small one - I have no idea what airline that is.

Incidentally, this talk of planes and airlines reminds me that even seventeen years after its initial release, Aerobiz Supersonic for the Super Nintendo remains an excellent game.

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Photo: Wings From the Jet Age

From Mad Men to Pan Am, it seems like the '60s are becoming cool again. I can understand why; even though it was a highly unpleasant time for vast swathes of society, the age also carried with it a transformative, optimistic culture that is dearly, sorely needed in this overcast twenty-first century. Looking back, it's easy to see the Jet Age as a time that was polished, refined, and poised on the edge of everything: a time when everything was possible.

The Boeing 707 was the jet of the Jet Age. It was on such a jet that my grandfather and immediate family first came to Canada in that long, hot summer of 1969. They flew BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, one of two airlines that was merged to form British Airways in 1974. We still have the original paper ticket from that flight forty-two years ago, so I can say that as of July 15, 1969, a round-trip flight from Manchester to Toronto - with a stopover in Montreal on both legs - cost $340.00; that works out to $2,092.04 in 2011 dollars. Today, the same round-trip ticket costs $1,113; of course, that's without any taxes, and it's also for one person. I guess the Jet Age may have been a bit cheaper after all.

Photographed is a BOAC 707 on the ground at Toronto International Airport on August 18, 1969.

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Photo: Planes Beneath the Mountains

I've been getting an anomalous number of hits today by people searching Bing for "Vancouver International Airport" - I can't explain why, because this weblog doesn't show up in at least the first two results pages - but I figured why not, if people are looking for things related to YVR, I'll provide!

I took this particular shot last time I was down there, looking across the field toward the North Shore Mountains. I wasn't expecting to find that American Airlines plane there; that line's not a common visitor to YVR, only flying from here to Dallas/Fort Worth, though for a while planes on that route did have a tendency to overfly my apartment in New Westminster, loud and low around 10 AM, during final approach. Behind it is one of the countless Air Canada flights that depart from here, and in front is a Horizon Air turboprop that could be bound either for Portland or Seattle.

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Photo: Handlin' that Baggage

In the course of my travels, luggage transfer is always one of those things that's been dealt with invisibly; you put your tagged bag on the conveyor belt, and then hours later you grab it from the carousel wherever it is that you were headed - unless you don't tip the baggage handler, in which case it will be in Honolulu. In between the beginning and the end - it's rare you have a chance to see it.

Just after my plane had pushed away from its gate at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, I caught this AeroMéxico Connect Embraer ERJ 145 at the next gate over loading luggage, getting ready for its own flight to Hermosillo.

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A Capsule of a Concept

When I flew to Toronto this Christmas, I had to take a taxi from New Westminster to Vancouver International Airport because, for some reason, the SkyTrain doesn't start running until 7 AM on Sundays. I regretted that greatly when the fare came out to $45 even before the tip entered into it - but I paid it, because I didn't want to worry about missing my plane, and because Air Canada encouraged travellers to arrive early during the holidays because of volumes.

Of course, being that this was Christmas Day, most everyone was already where they were going and so passengers were rather thin on the ground in the terminal. Also, my flight was delayed five hours. But early flights are common, and with the recommended arrival times always something to contend with, getting to the airport in proper time can be problematic - if you don't have a car, at least, which I manifestly don't. It only gets worse when you're flying internationally, and you find that from the departure times you've got no choice but to call a cab.

I'm really into choice, myself. I started wondering if there was another way - if there's something that the airport of the future could do to simplify this problem. I think there is: capsule hotels.

A capsule hotel in Osaka, Japan. This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CapsuleHotel.jpg under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Capsule hotels are just that - hotels where, instead of rooms, you get a small capsule big enough to fit yourself in with a pillow, bedding, a light, and so on. Their main advantage is that they're cheap; $24-48 CDN per night. They're easily stackable and don't take up too much space... and what do airports have, if not space?

I can imagine airports maintaining banks of capsules for brief overnight stays or travellers with long layovers. If it meant I could catch a 6 AM flight without having to stress out about how I was going to get to the airport, I would absolutely head on over at 11 PM the night before and rest my head for a few hours, comfortable in the knowledge that I wouldn't have very far to go at all to make my flight.

It's not for the claustrophobic, though.