Crazy Airports - Crazy Theories

Three links today, and my comments on them, with no segues connecting them.

Canada has lots of land, so lots of room for airports. Not all places that need airports are so fortunate. The airport in Gibraltar appears to be competing with surface traffic for a very small amount of flat real estate. The choices they made when painting the lines interest me. I suppose there were four possibilities: leave the intersection unpainted; paint it as a roadway; paint it as a runway; or paint it as both, with overlapping markings, like a highschool gym that is used for multiple sports. I would have chosen runway, both, neither, road, but the Gibraltar department of public works took my last choice. I'm still not entirely sure it's not photoshopped. Send me a picture of a runway that goes through a children's playground.

Commercial passenger air transport turns a hundred, dating back to the first paying passengers on zeppelins. If it hadn't been for the Hindenburg fire, I wonder how long the service would have persisted.

Humans are astoundingly good at pattern finding. We find patterns without realizing that we are finding them. We find patterns that aren't even there. And curiously, the less sense the world around us makes, the harder we look for patterns, and the more we find them, whether they are there, or even if they aren't. Every time I see a flash in my peripheral vision and identify an airplane, or a just a part of a runway and identify an airport, I'm doing this. Same with all the times I react to a half dozen birds or a wisp of cloud as if they were an airplane. False positives on detecting something that can kill you are pretty cheap.

That's it, just three links with nothing to do with one another. Unless you can see a pattern.

Paper Tickets

Depending on where or for how many years you have travelled by airline, you may or may not have seen a paper airline ticket. I'm not talking about a boarding pass, or the e-mail you print out from your computer, but the ticket itself. It's more like a coupon book, with one perforated tear-out page for each leg of your flight, each inscribed in red carbon with destinations, flight numbers and other industry codes. There's a picture in this article. In the old days, boarding passes were little pouches and when you checked in the agent put the appropriate coupon, along with the Warsaw Pact disclaimer and advertising junk inside the pouch. As you boarded the airplane, another agent took the coupon out and left you with the boarding pass. At the end of your trip you would have a collection of boarding passes and the final page in your coupon book, which was marked NOT VALID FOR CARRIAGE or some such. It was your receipt.

I'm saying all this in the past tense because most airlines use electronic tickets now, issuing boarding passes by matching your ID with a record of your having paid for the flight. And IATA, the International Air Transport Association, set the 31st of May this year as the deadline for elimination of paper tickets all together.

I've seen a few glitches with electronic boarding passes that says we'll have bits of paper with us for a while as we board the plane, but that's another post.

While preparing to bid farewell to the last paper airline ticket, someone I know asked who issued the first paper airline ticket, and what did it look like. I haven't managed to find a picture of one, and I bet they are vanishingly rare if there are any remaining, but I would be astonished if the first paper ticket were not issued by the first airline. It was called DELAG, and began operations in 1909, with domestic service at first, and then began transatlantic service in 1928. If you're struggling to reconcile those dates with what you know of airplanes, you haven't considered that the first airline didn't operate airplanes. DELAG carried up to 70 passengers at a time in zeppelins. I am certain that if a turn of that century German corporation accepted a fare for a journey that they would issue you a ticket. And they would inspect it carefully as you boarded.

The first airplane-based airline seems to have been the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. It may not have had tickets at first, because it carried only one passenger at a time, but it seems to have had all the hallmarks of a modern airline. Established with the aid of a government subsidy, the airline was subject to mechanical delays, levied a surcharge for excess baggage, and had to overcome government bureaucracy to get off the ground.

Regarding the baggage charges, passengers were allowed a maximum weight of 200 pounds gross, including hand baggage. "Excess weight [was] charged at $5 per hundred pounds, minimum charge 25 cents." The more I read that, the more I suspect that that two hundred pounds is including the passenger's body weight. Or perhaps people travelled with huge steamer trunks.

My favourite part of the story is that establishment of an airline required the government to issue the country's first ever airline pilot's licence. According to Edward C. Hoffman, president of the Florida Aviation Historical Society, that license has the word "Steamboat" crossed out and "Aeroplane" typed in.

That is government participating in the pioneering spirit of aviation. It always comes back to paperwork.