Modern Living: DESIGN FOR THE JET AGE

AS every air traveler knows, one of the massive deterrents to flying is the walking it involves. With the coming of the jets and the extra space their blasting exhausts require, airport acreage has multiplied, and the problem has become worse. The hike from check-in counter to the farthest reaches of the San Francisco International Airport is more than a quarter of a mile, or twice around a football field at a nonjog trot. Puffed one woman soon after Atlanta’s new $20 million airport opened in May: “I declare, if they had told me I would have to walk halfway to New Orleans, I’d have worn my shopping shoes.”

On Stilts. Washington’s Dulles International Airport, opened for business last week, is a gleaming glass and concrete monument dedicated to the abolition of the dread Last Mile in jet travel. The roof is a concrete hammock slung between rows of gracefully leaning concrete “trees”; everything else is glass, clear and untinted. More important, passengers emplaning at Dulles need walk only 150 feet to board the aircraft, although the plane is parked half a mile away.

The secret, if it proves as workable as its inventors hope, is the mobile lounge—a fat-tired monster that rolls regally over the landing strip like a parlor car on stilts. A few minutes before takeoff, passengers are ushered into the lounges, which fit snugly against the terminal building (flight schedules out of Dulles now quote the departure time of the lounge instead of the plane). Lounges are red-carpeted, air conditioned, furnished with comfortable chairs, soft lighting, tinted windows and, unavoidably, piped-in music. Upon reaching the waiting jet, an extensible ramp locks into the plane’s door, and the passengers walk into the plane without ever being exposed to the weather.

Each of these upholstered Trojan horses costs a staggering $232,000 and carries 90 passengers. It takes two to fill up a giant jet. Dulles will have 20 of them. In disembarking at Dulles, travelers will go through a reverse process, but the lounge does not have to be turned around: it can be driven, pushme-pullyou fashion, from either end. Passengers docking at the terminal in the first week of operation emerged from the lounges like pleasantly surprised moths popping from cocoons. Even the lounge drivers seemed to like the new idea. Said one: “It’s just like sitting on your front porch and driving your house down the street.”

The first commercial airport to be designed specifically for jets, Dulles and its mobile lounges are the creation of the late Eero Saarinen. He was a thorough man. When he was asked to submit a design, Saarinen sent out researchers armed with stop watches and counting clickers to “see what people really do at airports, how far they walk, their interchange problems.” The results of his findings were dramatized by longtime Saarinen Friend Charles Eames—for the benefit of the FAA and airline officials who needed convincing about mobile lounges—in a ten-minute cartoon film whose sound track featured the tramp-tramp, clunk-clunk of aching feet plodding through the measureless tunnels of the nation’s sprawling airports.

Travelers’ Nightmare. Saarinen’s researchers were dissatisfied with both of the two basic airport styles that have evolved. One is the “satellite” type, which consists of a huge central campus ringed with the individual terminals of a number of airlines. The “hand-and-finger” type is a central building housing ticket and check-in counters, baggage-claim facilities, shopping and eating places, connected by fingerlike corridors to gate lounges maintained by each airline.

New York’s Idlewild is the prime example of the satellite, or campus, airport; its nine terminal buildings (several serving more than one carrier) are scattered on the periphery of a sort of fountain-splashed world’s fairyland—awesome, bustling, and practical for passengers with no more complicated a mission than a simple arrival or departure, but a nightmare to travelers who have to change airlines in mid-Idlewild. Los Angeles International is another satellite airport with a similar problem. To get from the TWA satellite to the United satellite, a passenger must either risk the snarls of a taxi driver (who had expected to haul him into town, not ferry him around the campus) or clamber—baggage and all—aboard the Satellite Transit Tram. The tram is supposed to make the rounds every ten minutes, but its rare public appearances and slow pace dissuade passengers from chancing it.

Spooky Tunnel. The largest hand-and-finger airport is Chicago’s O’Hare, which, with more than 1,000 flights (including 412 jet takeoffs) a day, rivals Los Angeles’ as the busiest terminal in the nation. Its central rotunda has two huge arms angling off from it; radiating from the arms are labyrinthine fingers reaching out to jets parked at 66 gate positions, some of them 1,800 feet away from the main building. A foreign traveler who lands at the international building may have to walk nearly half a mile if he is transferring to a domestic flight to continue his journey.

At Idlewild there are many hand-and-finger terminals among the satellites, a complication that makes for more short tempers and shorter breaths. Even Saarinen’s own celebrated gull-wing TWA terminal (designed for a single airline that did not want to experiment with mobile lounges) has a spooky, 300-foot tunnel that humps out to a four-fingered hand in the middle of the TWA landing apron. Jetways—telescoping passenger corridors —connect the gate lounge with the planes, which cluster up to them like so many mating dragonflies.

Idlewild also has the best solution anywhere for a small terminal—Pan Am’s circular, pavilionlike terminal, to which planes nose up directly to the loading floor and passengers board directly across built-in ramps. However, the Pan Am design was never considered for Dulles because the circular form sharply limits the number of planes it can handle.

Noise & Access. Dulles International has problems of its own. For one thing, it is 28 miles from downtown Washington, and the trip costs $2.50 by limousine, $12.10 by cab. But jet planes need space, and Dulles International covers an area two-thirds the size of Manhattan. As other planners have discovered, that kind of acreage is not to be had close to any major city except at exorbitant cost. In an effort to shorten the travel time, Dulles planners came up with another innovation: a federally-built, limited-access road that will drain traffic off the public highway and run 14 miles directly into Dulles’ parking lot with never another entrance or exit. Says one FAA official: “Once you get on our expressway, the only place you can go is Dulles.”

Virginians who live near the road and would like to use it for Washington commuting are grumbling that the private airport expressway is unfair to them. However, they have less cause for grumbling on another score than do most residents within earshot of a jetport. In an effort to reduce the noise of incoming jets, strips of forest were left standing to insulate each runway, and an additional one million sound-absorbent trees have been planted around the edges of the airport’s 15-square-mile preserve.

No Panties. Last week the interior of the terminal buildings was still cluttered with scaffolding, and it will be weeks before the last shop and ticket counter are completed. When finished, the upper level will be given over to ticket counters and check-in operations, quality shops (“There’ll be none of those red nylon panties displayed around here,” says FAA Administrator Najeeb E. Halaby) and restaurants.

The lower level is for arriving travelers, where self-service baggage claim is speeded by the now familiar carrousel-type dispensers (luggage arrives via conveyor belt, is spewed onto a sort of giant roulette wheel where it rolls along the edge until claimed by its owners). Floors are polished concrete aggregate, colors will be kept low-key. On entering the soaring glass enclosure, the traveler feels as if he were already airborne. In his last visit to the uncompleted airport before his death in September 1961. Eero Saarinen remarked: “I think this terminal building is the best thing I have done. Maybe it will even explain what I believe about architecture.”