The FAA tracked deviations in flight patterns. NORAD and the NSA plotted threat scenarios. Fighter jets scrambled and locked on to jetliners that were still in the air. On-board devices recorded cockpit conversations. Cell phones connected doomed passengers with loved ones on the ground. Network and amateur video cameras documented impact from a variety of angles. Still, the metaphor stuck--"below the radar"--implying an act that was, somehow, -pre-technological and therefore, unpreventable.

In response, airport security was tightened and President Bush appeared at O'Hare to tell Americans that it was safe to fly again. Television carried scenes of National Guardsmen marching through terminals dressed in camouflage fatigues and carrying M-16's. "I noticed a big rifle while I was eating my Big Mac," said one passenger at Newark Airport where ninety of the soldiers were stationed.

If it wasn't already obvious, these images conveyed the inescapable truth: airports would play a front-line role in the coming global showdown. The newly formed Transportation Security Administration announced its Orwellian plans for CAPPS II (Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) to provide instant pre-flight profiles of passengers based on information drawn from FBI and CIA files, as well as bank and credit records. The relative sense of anonymity that travelers once took for granted was replaced by full electronic disclosure and a personalized "threat index" further eroding the precarious balance between security and insecurity. (Iris-scanning devices, the kind anticipated by science fiction, have already been installed.)

Once again, the future beckons and the airport becomes a gauge of human tolerance as it continues to provide a testing ground for new technology--a place where the underlying contradictions of the modern age are surprisingly transparent. Roland Barthes wrote that architecture is, simultaneously, an "expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience." This has been particularly true at the airport where dream and function have been so consistently intertwined. It is still the threshold of change, as it was in Lindbergh's day, but at this point in the twenty-first century, all vestiges of utopia have been lost.

Prologue | Prototypes | Friendship | Jet-Doric | Astroway