As I sit in London’s Heathrow airport awaiting my connecting flight to Israel, I find myself strangely fascinated by air travel.

Let me qualify this statement. I am not especially interested in the mechanics of how airplanes are able to fly. Nor am I fascinated by the actual experience of sitting on a cramped and noisy plane several thousand metres in the air, putting up with increasingly poor service as airlines continue their attempts to cut their operating costs amid present economic conditions, or passing through increasingly intrusive security checkpoints. What fascinates me is the whole notion of thousands of people traveling across the world each day from different places to different places, and the short intersection they have with each other, whether on the plane itself or in the airport terminal. The strange intimacy of this shared experience, however brief and singular, is fascinating to me.

There is another aspect of air travel that fascinates me as well. As I rode on a couple of the shuttle buses that connect Heathrow’s five terminals, I was also astounded by the sheer number of personnel, the level of infrastructure, and the myriad support services that are required to facilitate air travel. I was also awestruck by the number of airlines from all over the world that have planes parked at the various gates.

Perhaps all this sounds a little needlessly sentimental. But air travel itself has long provided fodder for the collective cultural imagination and epitomized certain socio-cultural ideals - some of which are perhaps foreign to authentic Judaism (for some reason I felt a need to include this as a sort of disclaimer of sorts or a legitimator of this rambling… hmmm…) A Google™ search reveals a number of relatively recent American newspaper and magazine articles nostalgic for the so-called “glamorous” and “sophisticated” air travel experience circa 1950, and discussing its post-1970s shift to a de-regulated commonplace form of mass-transit with constant security threats and “price wars” and the like. However, these articles also note that such romantic notions of air travel are themselves based more in marketing imagery than reality.

I’m really not sure exactly where I am trying to take this post - and it may seem somewhat disjointed - but it certainly keeping me entertained during this nine-hour layover, though perhaps I should be doing something more productive with this time.

On a practical note, I was quite pleased to discover (via some prior Google™ searching) that during my stopover, I could have a nice warm shower (£10 in the “Urban Retreat” lounge) and buy a Kosher cheese and veggie sandwich at Caffè Nero (which was quite decent - certified by the London Beth Din - that is, the sandwich, not the cafe), both in Terminal 1 “airside”.

And perhaps now I should go check which gate my connecting flight will be departing from.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Observation, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.