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.
[more inside]
posted by Your Time Machine Sucks
on Apr 25, 2008 -
36 comments
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 by amberglow
on Apr 29, 2007 -
107 comments
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 by allkindsoftime
on Jul 26, 2006 -
8 comments
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 by digaman
on Jan 25, 2006 -
52 comments
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 by Vidiot
on Dec 5, 2004 -
34 comments
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 by liam
on Apr 29, 2004 -
6 comments
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 by orange swan
on Jun 26, 2003 -
38 comments
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 by Su
on Jul 6, 2002 -
2 comments
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 by fotzepolitic
on May 31, 2002 -
7 comments
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 by nobody_knose
on Mar 11, 2002 -
36 comments
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 by readymade
on Dec 31, 2001 -
15 comments
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 by yevge
on Dec 12, 2001 -
9 comments
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 by xochi
on Oct 10, 2001 -
7 comments
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 by espada
on Oct 3, 2001 -
4 comments
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 by metrocake
on Sep 14, 2001 -
20 comments
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 by ericost
on Sep 14, 2001 -
14 comments
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 by mischief
on Sep 12, 2001 -
45 comments
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 by joeclark
on Sep 11, 2001 -
4 comments
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 by geoff.
on Sep 11, 2001 -
36 comments
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 by crasspastor
on Apr 2, 2001 -
4 comments
