Once upon a time, air travel was glamorous, exciting, something different from everyday ordinary life. Wasn’t it? I think that’s what I remember from my childhood, that’s what it looks like in old films. So how did air travel come to be a form of mass transportation? And an increasingly unpleasant form of mass transportation at that? In fact, I am beginning to suspect that more sinister forces are somehow at work here. I have started developing my own personal conspiracy theory about it.

Somehow it seems as though flying appears to be the most convenient manner of moving from point A to point B, whenever point A and point B are not in the same city, in which case going by car seems to suggest itself. Surely there is something wrong with the calculations, though? How could it possibly be cheaper and almost as fast to fly from Linz to London as to take the train from Linz to Vienna? And as someone recently pointed out, cheap airlines are destroying hitchhiking culture...

And what do we learn in the process?

First of all, air travel teaches us to simply accept wholly illogical, unreasonable and impenetrably arbitrary situations as givens as soon as we attempt to book a ticket. The connections, the conditions and especially the prices require us to abandon all logic and any attempt to comprehend the situation. That’s just the way it is. There is no explanation.

As a containment area for immense crowds, airports teach us to stand docilely in line, to wait and wait and wait, only to gratefully accept whatever further instructions might be given to us once we have waited long enough to reach any one in a long series of various checkpoints. Resistance is futile and impatience is counterproductive. The subtle coercion – it even seems voluntary – to wait patiently and ask no questions is further augmented by the lack of real air to breathe. The artificial and permanently recycled air that circulates in airports, in addition to the uncomfortable and irritating lights, probably has a seriously numbing effect on the brain. Yet we simply accept this as a given, an immutable fact of life when traveling.

Then there is the ever more complicated and elaborate issue of “security”. When and how did it become acceptable for perfectly sane and sensible people to meekly submit to handing over all their personal belongings, the entire, potentially embarassing contents of their pockets and half their clothing, then taking off their shoes to pass through a small opening to be sternly judged? Most often only to fail the test and be sent back to try again. And again. And again. How does it make the world a safer place to have fingernail files and hand lotion confiscated and lighters rolled up in small plastic bags? Whose interests are served, when adolescent boys are humiliated by having their low-slung pants fall off when they have to remove their belts, or when elderly women have to demonstrate in public how difficult it is for them to bend over to take off and put on their shoes?

At airports masses of people move around from one checkpoint to the next. At each checkpoint, each individual person is required to identify him or herself and prove their reason for being there – one at a time, one after another. The overall effect seems to be a process of extreme individualization. The masses of people constantly moving in an airport are not a crowd, do not form any kind of group, cannot develop anything like solidarity or mutual trust. They are masses of solitary and uniquely identifiable individuals, each one a potential threat.

If that is what airports are teaching us, is it something we really want to learn?