Zen and the Art of Airline Marketing

A couple of weekends ago, I flew to Michigan to visit my daughter at school.  When I arrived, we went straight to the Crisler Arena to watch a basketball game, where I dazzled her with my explanation of the finer points of the pick and roll.  I grumbled at the fact that none of the players seemed to know the proper way to roll after setting a pick – dropping the top leg so as to “seal off” the defender -- which creates a much better scoring opportunity.  Kids today.

Air travel for something that isn’t work has a certain allure.  Packing a bag with no dress shirts. Reading for pleasure. Paying attention to things, without the overhang of meetings or presentations.  

While boarding my flight to Detroit, I noticed that Delta’s ads lining the jetway mostly featured photos of people sitting in airplane seats and gazing at screens. Eyes vacant, faces softly illuminated by their phone or the in-flight entertainment system or an iPad shared with a significant other. 

It used to be that airlines would promote travel by showing attractive destinations (beaches, foreign cities, exotic dining). Now they promote travel by showing people looking at their phones.  You could say that Delta is, in a dime-store-Buddha kind of way, highlighting the journey, not the destination.  But of course it’s not really the journey: it’s the escape from the journey, enabled by screens and noise-cancelling headphones. “The ‘me time’ you deserve,” promises one ad. 

What does this say about Delta’s customer experience?  I suppose at one level you can commend them for their honesty. "We know that the experience of our product is so unpleasant," they imply, "we’re going to promote it by showing how you can remove yourself from that unpleasant experience thanks to technology.  Which by the way we will gladly enable by providing in-flight wifi, USB outlets at your seat, and unignorable video screens approximately 6 inches from your face."

Meanwhile, Apple recently launched their Vision Pro headset, the latest salvo in Silicon Valley’s war against human experience that is unmediated or non-monetizable.  Interestingly, their marketing for the Vision Pro also has a veneer of Zen.  A video shows a man standing at his uncluttered workspace, app windows floating gently in space around him. “Be in the moment. All over again,” Apple promises.

In a perverse way, marketing the Vision Pro in terms of a philosophy that extols the virtue of “non-self” is spot on.  When you use this product, you remove all direct connection with the outside world. What you perceive is completely captured, filtered, and presented by Apple, Inc.  With the headset on, your eyes as perceived by others are not your eyes at all, but an avatar, created and projected by the device. Your visual connection with reality has been severed, and a representation of that reality, one that is completely administered and controlled by a commercial interest, has been grafted in place. You, vis à vis the “real world,” cease to exist. 

Some of the reviews of the Vision Pro speak in similar terms of dislocation. “It's easy to lose track of where I am when I'm wearing the Vision Pro,” begins Scott Stein in CNet, who writes from “inside” the device, as if it were a whale that has swallowed him whole.

As I’ve mentioned before, the idea of self-annihilation shows up often in mystical traditions. The only way we can approach direct contact with the divine is to relinquish our egos.  If we do this right, we simultaneously embrace/submit to an essence (call it God if you’d like) that is surpremely powerful and loving and good. Delta and Apple also invite us to lose our selves, but in the service of late capitalism and the glory of spatial computing.

People are not buying this, figuratively and (especially given the $3,499 price point) literally.  Many of critiques of the Vision Pro have highlighted the horror of what this product is and represents.  And yet: a lot of reviews suggest that, once the technological bugs are sorted out, the miracle of augmented reality will usher in a new era of awesomeness.  All we need, they suggest, is Apple to get the hand-eye interface to work more smoothly, and we’ll finally be able to get lost.

 

Leaning into Recovery

“There is optimism overall as the industry, companies and travelers worldwide lean into recovery and the much-needed return to business travel."   (UPI, 17 Nov 2021)

 

My business travel game is extremely rusty.  I forgot to pack socks on a recent trip to Lisbon, leaving me hand-washing and blow-drying the same pair for three days.  For last week’s trip to DC, I forgot to pack jeans, so on the trip home I was rocking the suit pants, t-shirt and hoodie combination which suggests a hedge fund manager with a psychiatric disorder.  I used to be able to pack my bags like sniper assembling a rifle while blindfolded.  Now I stand in my bedroom staring at the floor, sure that I’m forgetting something but not sure what.

Things have changed at the airports.  Going through security, I don’t need to remove my laptop and iPad from my backpack anymore, although maybe that’s only because of TSA PreCheck, which I think I qualify for because I have Global Entry, but I’m not sure if this is the case at every airport.  Now there’s also something called CLEAR which you can pay for to get through security even faster.  I’m not quite sure how this works, but they’re selling it hard: one dude practically dragged me to the ground to offer me a free trial the other day.  “CLEAR makes you unstoppable,” promises their website.

I don’t know if there have been breakthroughs in airport screening technology which have enabled all this; or if the powers that be in the transportation industry have decided that a little less security is acceptable to get more people traveling again; or if people have simply stopped giving a shit about terrorism in the same way they seem to have stopped giving a shit about COVID-19. 

In any case, returning to traveling at least provides a respite from 7am Zoom calls, and an opportunity to stare at the ceiling in different transportation hubs around the world. 

Airport Ceilings, Vol. 3

Aeroporto Humberto Delgado, Lisbon (LIS).  Kind of cool to look at, in the way that early computer animation wireframes were kind of cool to look at in the 1980s.  This image in particular makes me think of the original Tron, or better yet The Black Hole.  Yet I feel like the designers have missed the mark here: this cold metal has nothing to do with the warmth one feels when visiting Lisbon.  And, for God's sake, if there’s one airport in the world which is crying out for tiles on the ceiling, it’s this one.

Oslo Gardermoen Airport (OSL).  This was taken pre-pandemic, which means that it feels like I was there either 5 months ago or 5 years ago.  Large, impressive, lots of natural wood, which seems on-brand for Norway.  I’m in the middle of doing some renovations, so I am unable to look at this ceiling without mentally calculating how much all that custom woodworking must have run them.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA).  Bright, domed, and teal, evoking the Capitol building and Disneyworld in equal measure.  I was down there for a conference and stayed at the Gaylord, itself the size of an airplane hangar.  These type of places always leave me marveling at the audacity of the human beings who conceived and executed such an immense structure.  “Live” conferences have started up again, and, from the upper floors, you could peer down the atrium into the lobby bar, which thrummed with industry people until way past their bedtimes.  It was also oppressively hot and humid during my visit, which amplified the languor one senses around DC, and which made the "swamp" metaphor feel a bit more well-chosen.

Aéroport Nice Côte d'Azur (NCE).  It’s hard to see from this picture, but this is a raised walkway, around 100 feet above the main terminal.  As if the designers had understood the desire to look at the ceiling, or to approach the sky, so they gave the airport visitors a lift.

This one was from February 2020.  I was on my way back to Geneva after a global leadership meeting in the south of France.  Our colleagues from China didn’t attend because of a virus which we had read a little about but didn’t give much thought.  I gave the same presentation four times, to different groups of my colleagues who rotated through.  On the last night, a bunch of us got on stage and sang “I Gotta Feeling” with the French cover band.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG).  As I’ve noted before, midwestern airports seem to have a thing for displaying fossils mid-terminal.  I was carefully positioning myself to get the McDonald’s logo in the background of this photo for maximum wry effect when I heard a voice over my shoulder:

“That’s the only one of those in the world.  You’ll never see another one like it.”

I turned to see a man, middle-aged and sandy-haired in a teal uniform shirt, who was working the information desk.

“A mammoth?” I replied, ready to counter that there is in fact a mammoth skeleton in the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College.

“That’s not a mammoth," the man said. "It’s an American mastodon with wooly mammoth tusks. Mastodon tusks are straight.”

I looked back up and confirmed that the tusks on this animal were in fact curved.

“They had mammoth tusks lying around, so somebody had the bright idea to stick 'em on a mastodon,” he continued.  “Took a 7^th grader to tell the museum people they had gotten it wrong.”

The man and I considered the mastodon/mammoth for a moment.

“Well,” I said, “perhaps they did that so no one would bang their heads on the tusks when they were walking by,” indicating with my hand the approximate angle at which mastodon tusks would intrude into the walkway and bonk the unalert traveler.

“Ha!” the man said, “I would love to see that!”

Airport Ceilings Volume 1 and Volume 2.

Grounded

It's like November 2016 all over again.  With each morning a fresh sprig of existential dread as I check the overnight news on my phone.  Today I learned that all of Italy, not just the northern provinces, is now on full quarantine, as their total number of cases approaches 10,000.  The financial markets got clobbered again yesterday – the S&P losing 8% and SAN.PA dipping below 80 (my online sell order for 85 thus blithely ignored).  My better half insists it's time to buy gold.

My company’s “non-business-critical” international travel ban is still on, so I continue to work from home at least until the end of March.  Working from home is what I do anyway when I’m not traveling, so it’s not too a big cramp in my style, so to speak.  Ask me again in four weeks.

The left-leaning media outlets in the US cannot resist engaging in some schadenfreude around Trump’s arrogance and ill-preparedness for all this.  There are 729 confirmed cases in the US as of this morning, but since test kits have been in short supply, one suspects that this is a gross underestimation, kind of a negative ascertainment bias. 

The Economist had a good piece in their “Graphic Detail” section (the one in the back near the obituary) analyzing travel patterns between other countries and China to predict how many cases a country should have versus the reported cases.  The US seemed to be underestimating only slightly, while Russia (“nothing to see here!”) should have many times more cases than they’re reporting.

Seeking succor in probability theory, I spent some of my Saturday fiddling with Excel to calculate the number of cases per capita by country.  A problematic exercise given the testing issues mentioned above, but I thought this might provide some context and clarity.  Here it is, sorted by cases per 100,000 inhabitants (cases as of Mar 10 am CET):

My Excel defaults to European decimal style, so the number for Italy is one-point-five cases per 100,000 inhabitants, not one thousand five hundred.  So one could look at this and conclude that there’s nothing really to worry about: you would have to shake hands with around 65,000 (100,000/1.5) Italians to encounter one infected person.  The current situation in the US – only one case per 14 million people – seems like nothing to lose sleep over.

Of course, this kind of logic crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.  In the Italian scenario above, there’s no way of knowing whether it will be the 65,000^th or the 1^st person you encounter who’s infected.  And of course it’s not the number of confirmed cases; it’s the number of carriers, most of whom are asymptomatic, out there, somewhere.  The numbers rise faster than we can keep track of them.  In the time it took me to write, edit, and post this entry, the number of cases in Switzerland went from 374 to 485.  My alma mater just told all its students not to bother coming back from spring break.  I don’t believe I will be seeing the inside of an airplane for a while.

Technical difficulties

I read once that certain German nursing homes have fake bus stops.  Evidently the patients on the dementia ward find comfort in the act of sitting on a bench under a little shelter and waiting for the bus, even if the bus is nonexistent and will never show up.  We followed an analogous ritual this morning when we all got on the plane that was to take us to Athens, only to get off it again around an hour later due to some kind of technical glitch that the engineering crew couldn’t sort out.  The pilot sheepishly informed us in Swiss-accented English that he “couldn’t accept the aircraft,” a phrasing which (perhaps by intent) gave me some comfort that he was looking out for us.  As if someone had offered him a Bombardier C Series 100/300 and, after giving it a once-over, he shook his head and said that it would not do.

So we lingered by our original gate for another half hour or so, until they told us that we would be taking a different airplane from another gate.  We redeemed the 5CHF voucher they gave us for some sandwiches.

I think it’s good for one’s soul to run into an issue like this every now and again.  It reminds you just how complicated and miraculous it is that we can get from one side of the planet to another in a matter of hours, and that always expecting this process to go perfectly smoothly (or, even worse, making plans with that expectation) is an unreasonable, if not immoral, thing to do.

Lent Back Nine

April 2, 2019 – GVAàAMS

A day trip to the office in Amsterdam, originally planned for a bunch of meetings which several people now can’t attend, so I will fly to the Netherlands mainly to participate in videoconferences that I could have done from home. 

Lent reading this morning was the parable of the prodigal son, and a bit from 2 Corinthians about regarding no one according to the flesh.  This, coupled with some of Laurence’s sermon from last Sunday, led me to a tidy summary of God’s message to man via Christ: “You’re all fucked up, but it’s okay.”  (also lends itself well to repeated chanting)

April 6, 2019 – GVA B gates

One of those early spring days in Geneva when there’s still a slight chill in the air, but some of the trees (I want to say alders but that’s probably completely wrong) are sporting precocious leaves, and you know that by the time you return from a week in Boston (where it will still be cold and grey) all the leaves in Geneva will have come out. 

Flying transatlantic on a Saturday feels like the definition of “free time,” since you have a whole non-workday after you land.  This is an illusion, of course.  The same amount of work which will be waiting for me on Sunday night is waiting for me now.  But I will have the chance to sleep in a little tomorrow before going to the MS Walk and, and then I’ll get to see Mia play soccer at 6.  Part of me wants to have a few drinks on the flight over, but there’s really no point.

Through the glass barrier to my left, people are getting off the plane that I’ll soon be getting onto.  Tired parents dragging children with zoomorphic roller bags.  Young girls in leggings and neck pillows, clutching mobile phones.    

April 7, 2019 – Cambridge, MA

My flight last night arrived a little early, and I wasn’t feeling too tired, so I drove to the Plough and Stars in Central Square to see a band.  I kind of knew the guitar player, who was in a band with someone else whom I was in a different band with years ago, so we were connected through the Transitive Property of Rock Bands.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that I didn’t stand out as the oldest person in the room: there were certainly a lot of student-aged types there, as one would expect in Cambridge, but also a lot of what I probably would have called “aging rocker” types, a category to which I probably belong myself.  Several men with grey beards and ample guts and horned-rim glasses.  Also a few of those deadpan record store types, one of whom, with long, straight hair and numb affect, sidled up next to me.

I realize that this is not really my scene: the music was fun, but I don’t feel super-drawn to the loudness and the booziness and the ringing skull the morning after.  There’s a certain romanticism to driving all over the US in a van (as this band does), but late nights in divey bars with rotating sets of mostly drunken people is something I would get very tired of very quickly.  At the same time, there was something beautiful about the scene: people who were not 20-something making music, and smiling while doing so.

Lent reading this week focuses on parenthood.  There’s a strong pro-adoption angle on the CTBI website, and it is nice to see so much space given here to people in “nontraditional” family situations: for instance, those who might be uncomfortable during “Mothering Sunday” service (which is evidently a thing, although my church didn’t do anything with it).  The Bible readings cover this as well: on the cross (Jn 19:25), Jesus bestows a mother/son relationship upon Mary and “the disciple whom he loved” (probably John).  And there is a mysterious passage in Luke (Lk 2:33), in which Simeon the quasi-mystic tells Joseph and Mary that their son is a big deal, but also that “…a sword will pierce through your own soul.”  This probably refers to the crucifixion, but part of my wants to read it also as a more general statement about that feeling when your children grow up and become their own people and you become less important to them.  I may be projecting.

April 9, 2019 – Cambridge, MA

I left the office after 7pm and took the red line to Harvard Square, where I walked around in the drizzly chill, picking up some things at Lush for the twins’ birthday.  I poked around the Harvard Book Store for a while, but emerged with only a used collection of E.B. White essays.  I gave a dollar to the homeless guy sitting outside.  I recall how it used to be acceptable to refer to people like this as “bums.” 

April 13, 2019 – British Airways Lounge, Terminal E, Boston Logan Airport

I felt a curtain of sadness fall when I was leaving my apartment in Cambridge for the airport tonight.  I’m not sure why: I will be extremely happy to be back home after a long and trying week.  I won’t be back in Cambridge again for more than a month, and as I turned the thermostats down, I imagined the empty apartment, with a few of my second-tier suits hanging in the closet, and some stray dirty laundry in the hamper.  Like a dead person’s house before the next of kin can get in there and clean things out.

Jose, who works at the BA lounge in Boston, always says hello and shakes my hand when he sees me here.  We don’t have much to say to each other, but it’s nice to say hello, and I’m always impressed at his friendliness, which seems genuine.  And out of place in a transient place like an airport lounge.  But every place is transient, in a certain sense.   I watch the Masters on TV in the window reflection.  Everyone swings left-handed except for Phil Mickelson.

Like I said it was a difficult week at work, but I found myself comforted by Philippians 3:12 (“Not that I…am already perfect, but I press on to make it [the resurrection] my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”).  I feel my heart warmed especially by the “press on” line, even though what Paul is writing about has absolutely nothing to do with pharmaceuticals.  People look for encouragement wherever they can find it, even if the context is all wrong.  The Bible is a target-rich environment for this.  I believe this is what one would call cognitive bias.         

Airport Ceilings, Vol. 2

Orlando International Airport.  The architects who designed "Mission to Mars" at Disneyworld were offering a package deal that month.

Chicago O'Hare, Terminal 1.  A helpful reminder as you're scurrying to catch your connection that one day you too will be extinct, and if you're lucky your fossilized remains may be put on display on the way to the frequent flyer lounge.

Helsinki Airport, one of many modern airports whose ceiling looks like it was made out of GeoMag, which doesn't exactly soothe any pre-flight jitters.  Speaking of, the GeoMag advertising slogan is "It's all about invisible forces," which is pretty great if you ask me.

SFO.  I caught some heat the last time I tried to say something about San Francisco on this website, but I think I can atone here.  This is a first-class airport ceiling: complex but not busy, open but not too bright, evoking the sky but also a sailboat's rigging.  You might be so busy appreciating the overall kind vibe that you might not even notice the fabulous rainbow stained glass arcs which grace the edge of the window panels.

Madrid Barajas Airport, which for some reason reminds me of a bowling alley, with the wooden slats and the NASA-inspired center console-looking thing.  Don't get me wrong, though, because both Madrid Barajas and Barcelona El Prat are extremely pleasant places to spend time.  

Shanghai Pudong International Airport, Terminal 2.  At first glance, this looks a bit like the mirror image of Madrid Barajas.  But, like Shanghai itself, pictures don't begin to capture the mind-bending enormity of the place, as the banners displaying the gate numbers multiply into the distance, and the ceiling sine-waves into infinity.  And of course there's Terminal 1 (not pictured here), almost as big, with a roof shaped like a seagull.  And of course there an entire other airport.

London Heathrow Terminal 5.  Perhaps the writers of those corny Hollywood scenarios had it right, and that when our time is up we will be called into the light, and as we slowly ascend and the light draws nearer, we will feel a deep, reassuring warmth, and the unfiltered joy of all that we have experienced and loved, and we will be enveloped by God's grace.  And then we will go through security and there will be a Wagamama and high-end duty-free.

Airport Ceilings, Vol. 1

Book Swap

Last week, I came across a book exchange cart near one of the gates at Orlando International Airport (MCO).  None of the titles on display called to me (Nora Roberts and Outdoor Photographer magazine were heavily represented), and I hadn't yet finished any of the books I had on me, so I didn't take or leave anything.

I'm not sure who or what was behind this; there's no mention of this on the MCO website.  And I don't know if there's any connection between the book cart and the National Women's History Month display behind it, featuring Oprah and J. Lo alongside Amelia Earhart.  I thought for a minute that all the books on the cart might have been written by women in keeping with that theme, but I see Daniel Silva and Gordon Thomas in there, so that's not it, unless somebody else left those there.

Anyway.  This is not a revolutionary concept: there's a book exchange at our office in Amsterdam, and a couple more within a few blocks of where I live.  Still, this seems like something hopeful and good: an island of art and ideas and slowness and sharing and human connection (albeit anonymous), in a river of haste and commerce and transience.  Like a flower on a highway median.  This book cart will probably suffer the same fate as the flower, but we can appreciate it while it's there.

Airport Ceilings, Vol. 1

The architects who design airports seem to put a lot of effort into ceilings.  Maybe they anticipate that those of us inside will spend a lot of time gazing upward -- out of boredom, or exasperation, or in search of divine succor in one form or another. 

Paris Charles de Gaulle, Terminal 2, F Gates.  Beautiful, impressive, audacious, and generally uncomfortable to spend any amount of time in.  Not unlike Paris.  Although this is a step up aesthetically from the rest of of CDG, which has the design sensibilities of the Death Star.

Geneva International Airport, A Gates.  My home airport tries hard to be sophisticated and modern yet approachable, with little touches like the Rick and Ilse photo display here (Rhett and Scarlett are downstairs on the way to baggage claim).  I'm not sure if they completely pull it off, but I'm not complaining, especially as I can get from my front door to a departure gate in less than 30 minutes.  A direct to Boston would really be nice though.

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Schiphol Plaza.  Steampunk mushrooms.

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Terminal 1 Security.   Heh, heh, "grass," get it?  I sense a theme developing.

Boston Logan International Airport, Terminal E.  Going for the high school gymnasium vibe -- I expect to see a "State Champions, Girls Tennis, 1983" banner around the corner.  The nod toward internationalism is welcome, especially in a US airport, although the super-sized stars and stripes doesn't let you forget who's numero uno here.

I found this in my photo files without a label, and I'm actually not sure where this is.  I think maybe Porto, Portugal?   It's pretty though.

Aeroporto di Milano-Malpensa.  Not much to look at on the ceiling, but the floor looks like outer space, especially if you squint your eyes a little.

Flughafen Zürich, my Favorite Airport in the World.  Calm, quiet, well-conceived with earth-tone marble and high windows and the corny-but-irresistable tram to Terminal E with the cowbell / alpenhorn soundtrack and the Zoetrope Heidi.  Swiss Quality, indeed.