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Astroway

In time, the free-standing terminals lost their architectural identity. The soaring aesthetic of the 1960s gave way to an ad-hoc style of hyper-extended breezeways: narrow prosthetic piers, walkways, flyways, jetways, all devised as schematic solutions to one inter-modal dilemma or another. Terminal floor plans began to mirror the complex geometries of air traffic itself--those aerial corridors, VOR radials and approach vectors that filled radar screens. Described as the "leanest structure in history," the finger, or variations thereof, became the panacea for all forms of airport chaos and sprouted recklessly like an architectonic form of Kudzu.

While fingers were always long and lean, they came in different guises. Some were Erector-set steel and glass, others were sheathed in concrete or ribbed aluminum and stretched between terminals and boarding satellites on the apron. There were straight ones at Kennedy and Love Field, Dallas, T-shaped fingers at Logan, sprocket-shaped fingers at San Francisco, and "split-finger" piers at Atlanta and Memphis. Fingers were also used to connect with ground transportation centers, or straddle highways to reach waffle-stacked parking structures, car rental agencies, and airport hotels. Indeed, the finger was the airport's gift to architectural history and would become a solution outside the airport context, at shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, resort hotels, convention centers--places that demanded seamless enclosure and retail flexibility.

But many found these passageways unnerving and intimidating. John Updike described one airport as being a "long rats'-passage of corridors," and the aero-phobic's fear of flying was magnified by such elongated mutations. Some compared the finger to a cattle chute or a "hallway without end." One writer described it as an "above-ground tunnel." And there were below-ground versions too, like the 420-foot long sensory deprivation tubes at LAX that burrowed between terminal and satellite.

A sense of squeezed linearity was extended even further with new kinds of automated boarding ramps that provided direct connection between building and aircraft. There would be no more passengers running across rain-smeared tarmacs; no more geriatrics breaking hips on slippery steps; no more skirts blown up in sudden gusts of wind, but something was lost: the true sensation of transit as travelers crossed an open airfield and climbed aboard a plane. One could sense the horizontal sweep of the landscape, and smell traces of fuel oil in the air. In the Jumbo era passengers became oblivious to the outside world, moving through concourses that were double-glazed and super-insulated to muffle the roar of jet engines. Thus conventional points of entry disappeared. Glass doors opened automatically at the command of seeing-eye photoelectric cells. Moving sidewalks, escalators, baggage conveyors whispered hydraulically. Departure lounges were shadowless holding tanks, saturated with muzak and fluorescent lighting. Video screens, first introduced in the 1970s, glowed dimly with arrival and departure times.

The experience was vacuum-sealed from beginning to end as if entering a tube that was open wide in front and then narrowed in diameter through concourse, finger and boarding ramp into the tubular body of the plane itself. At the destination end, the process would be repeated, but in reverse. One air terminal of the 1970s was described by its architect as being "a funnel leading from its parking garages and drop-off curb, through a linear concourse directly to its [boarding] pavilion." There was no break, no sense of threshold or transition, certainly nothing gate-like in this funneling process and it all started to feel more like simulation than actual travel. "Encapsulation is a good part of the price paid for speed" lamented George Nelson.

As early as 1958, United Airlines had unveiled its "Aero-Gangplank," a cantilevered ramp enclosed with stainless steel panels and propelled by a small motorized dolly. It could swivel around in a 180-degree arc and telescope out to meet the jets with a rubberized weather seal that conformed to the shape of the aircraft like the lips of a sucker fish.

International pictographs for airports, 1970

There was an ironic side-effect to these long appendages: While able to fly anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, jumbo jet passengers were now forced to walk longer distances on the ground. "[The fingers] are sheer hell for the traveler, as anyone knows who has hiked what seems miles along these noisy, confusing, crowded, hard-paved, and slippery corridors, baggage in hand and/or babe in arm, anxious to catch a connecting plane," wrote critic Wolf Von Eckardt. By the end of the early 1970s, passengers were walking an average of 650 feet from parking lot to check-in. From check-in to plane was another 950 feet, which made for an average walk of 1,600 feet, five times the length of a football field. In this pre-aerobic era, that was more than some Americans walked in a week.

The marathon of airport trekking, however, was O'Hare which became known in the trade as "cardiac alley," because in-transit passengers had to walk, in some cases, over a mile-and-a-half through the airport's endless glass tentacles. "I was half way to Michigan before I got on the plane," complained one weary travel writer. Internal pedestrian traffic at Atlanta/Hartsfield became so congested at one point that bright yellow traffic lines were painted along the floors to keep the crowds moving on the right side.

Moving sidewalks helped to accelerate the process, but they also added to the sense of encapsulation that now characterized the airport experience. To help passengers traverse the thousand-foot long passageways at Love Field/Dallas, engineers devised a system of moving sidewalks that were said to have been the first in airport history. The walkways moved in two directions at the granny-friendly speed of one-and-a-half miles per hour, but they seemed futuristic at the time. Rubes from outlying communities made pilgrimages to Love Field just to ride back and forth.

American Airlines announced that they would take the "walking out of flying" and at LAX, where passengers had to march 1,250 feet from check-in to plane, the company installed a moving sidewalk in the underground concourse that ran between terminal and boarding satellite. The automated rubber sidewalk was similar to the kind used at Love Field but it moved faster and could make the 420-foot trip in three minutes flat. It was officially called the "Astroway"-- "astro" being the space-age prefix of the day. The public relations people worried that customers would have negative associations and be frightened away.
Conveyor belts were used in assembly line production for dumb, inanimate objects, not for people. So TV comedienne Lucille Ball was invited to inaugurate the device and show consumers that moving sidewalks were not only safe but fun. Everyone was supposed to remember the famous episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy worked at a chocolate factory and had to sort a stream of bon bons that rushed along the conveyor belt. She rode the Astroway cracking jokes to a group of reporters who ran along beside her. At first she was unsure of her balance on the moving rubber mat and clutched onto the hand rail, but then she gained confidence, raised her arms and cried to the reporters: "Look mom, no hands..."

Prologue | Prototypes | Friendship | Jet-Doric | Epilogue