With the grounds it was built on having hosted the first demonstration of airplane flight in 1909, Tempelhof International Airport, the world's second-oldest working commercial airport, was officially opened in 1923. Also known as City Airport, it takes its official name from the Tempelhof neighborhood of Berlin, itself named for the Knights Templar who owned its land in the Middle Ages.
posted on Apr 25, 2008 - View this thread

Roads To Riches (or We've Got a Bridge in Brooklyn to Sell You--Seriously) -- Why investors are clamoring to take over America's highways, bridges, and airports—and why the public should be nervous.--...a slew of Wall Street firms—Goldman, Morgan Stanley, the Carlyle Group, Citigroup, and many others—is piling into infrastructure ... Assets sold now could change hands many times over the next 50 years, with each new buyer feeling increasing pressure to make the deal work financially. It's hardly a stretch to imagine service suffering in such a scenario; already, the record in the U.S. has been spotty. ...
posted on Apr 29, 2007 - View this thread

AirPower Wiki looks like its just getting off the ground, but if you travel much, you know the hassle of finding a power outlet in an airport. Hopefully it grows fast and furiously.
posted on Jul 26, 2006 - View this thread

Tired of standing in line at the airport? Worried that you might share a name with a known terrorist or subversive on the TSA's mysterious no-fly lists? Relax. Get fingerprinted and/or iris scanned. And pay $79.95 a year to become a Registered Traveler, and fly Clear in the fast lane. (And note how quickly conceptual art projects become indistinguishable from reality.) Meanwhile, the Feds settle an ACLU lawsuit over the no-fly lists... while revealing no information about them. [Lists recently discussed here].
posted on Jan 25, 2006 - View this thread

"It shows nipples. It shows the clear outline of genitals." Fact: airport security is not effective against a determined terrorist. Response: "backscatter" imaging. Your trip through security will look like this. The security personnel will see something like this. It's safe! It's effective! Except for fat terrorists ("a weapon or explosives pack could be tucked into flabby body folds that won't be penetrated by the scanner") and people with guns in their body cavities.
posted on May 24, 2005 - View this thread

French police on Sunday ended their practice of hiding plastic explosives in air passengers' luggage to train bomb-sniffing dogs after one such bag got lost, possibly ending up on a flight out of Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport.

WTF were they thinking? Isn't there a better way to train the dogs without making innocent people unwittingly carry plastique?
posted on Dec 5, 2004 - View this thread

Buying biometrically into big brother? Privium is an IBM-backed pay service at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport that allows passengers to identify themselves by iris recognition and thus speed their way through security checks. This being the privacy-respecting Netherlands, the biometric information is not stored in a central database, but only on a card you carry with you; other countries may not be so enlightened. This could well become a standard form of identification. In the meantime, could the failure to buy this service qualify someone as a security or insurance risk?
posted on Apr 29, 2004 - View this thread

Air Marshal Forgets Gun in Airport Bathroom
Are we safer yet?
posted on Apr 12, 2004 - View this thread

"If you don't do as I tell you, I'll personally take you out in the woods and shoot you." A top federal security official at the Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport angrily threatened to "shoot" baggage screeners and financially ruin their families if they did not do their jobs to his satisfaction, airport employees have told the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general.

All jokes about bombs, guns and killing will be taken seriously?
posted on Jan 30, 2004 - View this thread

A woman gets a stun gun and a knife past security at LaGuardia and actually alerts authorities after she discovers them in her purse. Anybody feel safer yet? Anybody?
posted on Jan 26, 2004 - View this thread

20-year old college student calls the TSA and tells them security is below-par. Then he proves it. Taking the hacker's ethic of "exposing weakness for the greater good, law be damned" this guy did just that by planting knives and other objects with little notes admonishing the TSA. Feeling safe yet? The TSA thinks we should be.
posted on Oct 17, 2003 - View this thread

The Budget Traveller's Guide To Sleeping In Airports. Overnight flight delayed far from home? Can't afford a room at one of those boring, noisy airport hotels? Stuck in Japan on a cancelled layover and too chicken to rent out a capsule? Well, why not try sleeping in the airport? The B.T.G.T.S.I.A. has tips for "pro" airport sleepers, best and worst airports to sleep in, and as an added bonus, stories of strange non-airport sleeping places.
posted on Sep 22, 2003 - View this thread

Would you prefer this to being patted down? A scanner the government is testing for airport screening reveals much more than meets the eye to be comfortable for most passengers. The agency hopes to modify the machines with an electronic fig leaf - programming that fuzzes out sensitive body parts or distorts the body so it does not appear so, well, graphic.
posted on Jun 26, 2003 - View this thread

The Official History of net.art, Volume I: History of Art for Airports appropriates the style of universal informational graphics to represent subjects ranging from St. Sebastien and the Pieta, to the Star Trek transporter effect and the international sign for cannibalism you might have seen on a t-shirt.
posted on Jul 6, 2002 - View this thread

Questioning the myth of plastic knives and boxcutters. "This fictoid serves to divert public attentions from the responsibility, and legal liability, of the government and airlines to prevent major weapons — such as guns, bombs, chemical sprays and hunting knives [all of which were mentioned in flight attendant and passenger cell phone calls] from being carried aboard airplanes. If such illegal devices had been smuggled aboard the planes, the liability could amount to billions of dollars. If, on the other hand, it could be disseminated that the hijackers had only used plastic knives, such as those provided by the airlines for meals, or box cutters, which were allowed on planes, neither the airlines, the screeners at the airport, or the FAA, which regulates the safety of airports, could be held legally responsible."
posted on May 31, 2002 - View this thread

No Profiling, No Saftey? ...to placate special interest groups that fear profiling will result in widespread racial or religious discrimination, authorities are imposing screening quotas that are unlikely to thwart a future terrorist attack. They should be doing the very opposite by creating more sophisticated profiling systems that catch real criminals. Is it really "damned if they do, damned if they don't" or is there a better way?
posted on Mar 11, 2002 - View this thread

The town of Gander in Newfoundland, Canada is a town of 10,000 where 6600 airline passengers were diverted after the attacks of September. While hearing a radio story about it on NPR, I was moved to flubbery tears by the outpouring of camaraderie and cooperation by the townspeople and passengers. Happy New Year, Canadians, and everyone else too, after quite a tumultuous year.
posted on Dec 31, 2001 - View this thread

No high school diploma or GED required for new aiport security screeners. The author of the bill, Senator Kay Bailey-Hutchison of Texas, "said Sunday she would prefer airport security screeners have at least a high school education, but it is a "judgment call." The DOT requirements page requires a h.s. diploma, ged, or "one year of any type of work experience that demonstrates the applicant's ability to perform the work of the position." In a rush to overhaul the system, are we setting our standards too low?
posted on Dec 31, 2001 - View this thread

New travel package minimizes the amount of time it takes for you to get from the airport to the beach. Now you can get off the plane, and start swimming and sunbathing in no time! Isn't this amazing?
posted on Dec 12, 2001 - View this thread

How, exactly, did this happen? I'll tell you how. I happened to be at O' Hare yesterday, and the security drones there were about as dumb as a bag of wet mice (more in comments).
posted on Nov 5, 2001 - View this thread

Surprise! National Review thinks the market can provide for better airport security. Talk about ignoring evidence...
posted on Oct 30, 2001 - View this thread

Debate over brain scans Over at the Register, one of their writers has gotten into a fantastic pissing contest with InfoSeek's founder over the issue of brain scans and airport security. What are your thoughts?
posted on Oct 10, 2001 - View this thread

Washington National shuts out Air Canada - and there am I thinking didn't George Bush recently call us "family"?
posted on Oct 4, 2001 - View this thread

Next attack by containership? The head of security at Logan Airport, responsible not only for security lapses that led to 2 of the 9/11 hijackings but hundreds of other lapses as well, has been removed from his post--and reassigned as the head of security at the Port of Boston. Mass. politics at its finest.
posted on Oct 3, 2001 - View this thread

Airport Detainees Cleared At least 10 travelers of Middle Eastern descent who were detained at two New York airports have been cleared of any connection with Tuesday's terrorist attacks, Sen. Joseph Biden said Friday.

"Anyone with dark skin or who spoke with an accent was taken aside and searched," passenger Mike Glass of Seattle told the Times. "And then they went to any male with too much facial hair."

Isn't this going too far? >more<
posted on Sep 14, 2001 - View this thread

Senator Biden says that yesterday's arrests at NY airports were NOT connected to Tuesday's attacks, and those arrested were not carrying knives.
posted on Sep 14, 2001 - View this thread

Investigators Detain 10 at NY Airports; Bin Laden Focus Grows Authorities took 10 people into custody from New York City's two major airports after finding they had false identifications and knives, law enforcement officials told ABCNEWS.com.
posted on Sep 13, 2001 - View this thread

Knives with blades shorter than five centimetres would normally be allowed onto an aircraft , according to Mal Dunn "who headed the aviation security division of the [Australian] Civil Aviation Safety Authority. 'I'm not convinced that this was necessarily caused by lax security. My experience is that US airports are usually very diligent,' he said. 'The principle of people carrying knives is pretty clear and internationally recognised. The criteria are associated with the length of the knife; anything over two inches [five centimetres] long is considered dangerous and is usually taken off the individual." I was dumbfounded to hear these planes had been hijacked with knives, but reading the preceding still chills me. Perhaps, the time has arrived to rethink these measures as they appear to be so ignorant in hindsight.
posted on Sep 12, 2001 - View this thread

Canada: Spillover Nation Essentially every airport in Canada able to land a jumbo jet has done so. Halifax is packed to the walls with 44 planes; 24 at Pearson; 14 at Mirabel; two in Whitehorse, one of them, a KAL cargo plane, undergoing an escorted quasi-emergency landing because the pilot could not communicate in English with the control tower (!) to explain that the plane was low on fuel. Serious echoes of Swissair 111, where suddenly the small Atlantic airports showed themselves as invaluable and irreplaceable.
posted on Sep 11, 2001 - View this thread

Gas prices did in fact spike to $5.00 a gallon in some areas of St. Louis, Kansas City and Oklahoma. All Conoco stations that have spiked their prices will have their licenses immediately revoked. Avis still hasn't responded to their price gouging around midwest airports.
posted on Sep 11, 2001 - View this thread

"I think the potential of the small-plane technology revolution is to make small planes seem more reasonable to people below the millionaire class," says James Fallows, author of Free Flight, a book in which Fallows advocates the use of safe next-generation compact airplanes to act as air-taxis, thus offering the masses an alternative to the hub-and-spoke system of air travel.
posted on Jul 26, 2001 - View this thread

FAA=The Keystone Cops? What kind of legal fallout can we expect from this? Considering the kind of wealth onboard the doomed flight, how much of us little'uns safety is considered on a general basis? I went to the airport the other day to pick up my dad, and unlike the other times where I'm asked to "change the display" on my phone and my cigarette pack is opened, they now lazily let me pass. Is there really any FAA supervison? We all have stories. Anyone care to share? Links, theories, conspiracy theories, stories. Please tell.
posted on Apr 2, 2001 - View this thread

Airport BodySearch may reveal more than passengers know
Does anyone really care if the lonely airport security guards have a look under your clothes?
posted on Aug 21, 2000 - View this thread