Air travel was once glamorous, and airports an exciting window to that world. Now, that heady ozone of glamour and optimism has all gone. It is hard to remember that what is today a third-world airport on the edge of London was once called Britain’s gateway to the world. It is a symbol of a transient world of alienation and discontinuities, life in transit.
Heathrow subjects people to conditions that are an intolerable affront. The misery of arriving there has become is a shocking advertisement to the world, the huddled masses on the floor mocking the country’s global business aspirations.
That said, most airports are awful. Some are terrible. First impressions count, and last impressions have a disproportionate impact on one’s memory, and this rings true for flying as much as anything else. That Heathrow has become a byword for wretched customer service is in part a result of the challenges progressively facing all countries over the past decade.
Security is the reason Heathrow’s arrival halls at times resemble a refugee camp. Where once travelling was predictable, today it is a theatre of the absurd, a place to watch the airport security follies. Vulnerability to illegal immigrants and potential terrorists has led, not to a risk-and-intelligence-based approach to controls alongside profiling and selective screening, but instead exhaustive passport checks for everyone. The cycle of overhyped terror and the multimillion dollar surveillance industry has led open democracies turning into Orwellian surveillance societies, as the theatre of terror meets the drama of security in the world’s airports.
Survival guides appear with tips for the worst places to be, Heathrow topping the list of many foreign commentators despite BAA’s best efforts to convince us with its own surveys that T5 is so great we might forget to ask about 1-4.
The list of navigational aids for reaching the departure gate on time at airports around the world gets longer and longer. Phone apps such as GateGuru, iFlyPro, and Airport Transit Guide will help you find your way there, and to the nearest sandwich shop or bathroom, as we all monitor the flights board.
Frommer’s travel guide website ranks the world’s airports. In 2012 the best, it claims, was the Hajj Terminal at the King Abdul Aziz Airport in Jeddah, covering 49 ha and open only for six weeks at a time during pilgrimages to Mecca. The most striking feature of a design that has stood the test of time for 25 years is the 210 white fibreglass tents that create a chimney effect to cool the hot desert air.
Second best is the Leifur Eiríksson Terminal at Keflavik Airport in Iceland. The others in the top 10 are Seoul, Wellington, New York JFK (T5),Singapore, Madrid, Marrakech, Montevideo, and Bilbao. These lists abound. Voted worst in the world in 2009, according to a global poll of air travellers, Heathrow took the 99th spot in another poll of customer satisfaction in 2011, some way below Calcutta, sending the British press into paroxysms of despair. They couldn’t help the Oh, Calcutta! headlines. To British ears the very name of India’s first capital stirs images of one of the world’s filthiest, most polluted cities, garbage rotting in the street and overflowing drains.
Frommers is as debatable as any other compilation, but its latest edition lists the worst as New York JFK (T3), Manila, Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport B/C, Nairobi and Paris Charles de Gaulle. It is the aim of Paris to be in the best top five by 2016, according to Alexandre de Juniac, Air France chief executive. That is going to be a real challenge.
Paris – in a race for survival, to the hub
That Paris boasts one of the least loved airports in the world is not open for debate. Paris Charles de Gaulle represents what many people hate about air travel. Since its first terminal opened in 1974 passengers have become progressively more disenchanted.
Today, eight structures sprawl 30 minutes’ drive north of Paris. Interminable walks await travellers wishing to navigate their way past mediocre restaurants and forgettable shops with often indifferent personnel, as they attempt to reach the correct check-in and passport control on time.
The various terminals are now linked by an automatic light-rail shuttle and several buses. Albeit Europe’s second-largest airport and seventh in the world, with more than 61 million passengers in 2011, it desperately needs a push towards friendliness and efficiency.
Richard Spencer of HOK observed in FX in 2001: ‘It’s possible to propose a theoretical history of airport-terminal design that identifies a progression through "eras" based on the cultural perception of air travel, and its transformation from an exclusive, exotic and heroic activity into an everyday means of mass transport,’ from sheds to metaphors of flight and examples of heroic modernism, and on to the grand palais, the creation of grand and memorable spaces where he cited Paul Andrieu’s Terminal 1 at Paris Charles de Gaulle.
Emotional and memorable qualities began to fade out in Spencer’s next phases of increasing homogeneity, cue Terminals 2 and 3 of development at CdG, to be followed by airports with a sense of place that in extreme cases become theme parks with vernacular wallpaper.
Of Paris CdG Stephen Walsh, the doyen of airport commercial developments, said: ‘It is one of those airports that is great on style but lacking in substance. The terminals look great, the architecture is legendary but don’t try to transfer through CdG unless you have to. You will find the experience slow and frustrating in terminals that seem to be designed for small numbers of small people rather than the volumes of all-sized passengers who, like you, are trying to find their way.
‘Beneath their impressive envelopes there is little space where you need it most – in the terminals airside. ADP [Aéroports de Paris] is long on process and short on experience, preferring the former to dictate the latter.’
Walsh once worked in Africa for DI Design, ran Fitch in the Middle East, founded Crighton in the Eighties, was a director of BDG McColl in the Nineties when he ran the team that developed Vienna Airport, and subsequently worked extensively in Germany before becoming a director of ARC, travelling the world winning business.
His track record includes involvement in a string of airports around the Gulf and across Europe and Asia, from Muscat to Mumbai, Melbourne to Madrid, and from Munich to the Maldives. His views are strong and his instincts true. It was more than 25 years ago that he penned the now obvious line ‘airport shopping centres are the single most effective generator of nonaeronautical revenue for airports’ and he has gone on to prove it and show airport operators how to maximise their profits. By understanding the aims of those operators together with the needs of the retailers and what the customer wants, he has helped to create satisfying experiences for the shopper, turnover for the airports and profits for the concessions by demonstrating how to unlock the substantial revenue potential of outlets provided they were properly located, planned, designed, leased, merchandised, promoted and managed.
Last summer, Aéroports de Paris began an overhaul of is operations at CdG. The need to make catching a plane there more enjoyable comes as all the major European transfer hubs face increased competition. With an accord struck in 2008 allowing all the European and American airlines the right to fly between any two airports in either region, transatlantic choice hotted up and there was a push by all the major airports towards greater capacity and improved services. Thus CdG, with its emphasis on Parisians, was always less appealing to foreigners, faced the daunting prospect of developing its infrastructure fast, not just to compete but to survive.
In a move to rationalise its operation, the transformation began last July with a new 100,000 sq m satellite to Terminal 2E dedicated to the long-haul international flights of the SkyTeam Alliance that includes Air France. This immediately consolidates 60 per cent of the airport’s total traffic, currently spread across three terminals. The impact on passengers travelling within the visa-free Schengen area will be significant as all flights to and from 26 countries will in future be grouped next door in Terminal 2F. The walk for people transferring from intercontinental to European flights will be considerably reduced, and the elimination of the need for a second security check will also save time, giving everyone more opportunity to make use of 6,000 sq m of shops and restaurants and, for those flying premium class on Air France, time to enjoy the new 600-seat lounge. There will even be a small showcase museum for exhibitions in the capital, including the Louvre.
Overall the upgrade will cost around £2.bn by 2015. The new building, called Satellite 4, is costing £456m and will accommodate an additional 7.8 million passengers a year. Seven of the 16 new gates will be capable of handling the Airbus A380. To address staff shortcomings the airport has begun what it calls its ‘Service University’, aimed at training employees to be more responsive to customers’ needs. More than 5,000 people attended courses there in the past year, including airport and airline staff, security and border staff.
The development of Terminal 4 dovetails with a whole series of other projects. Aéroports de Paris, in a joint venture with Aelia, unveiled the £1.9bn full-scale retail overhaul of both CdG and Orly in 2010. In a refashioning of major proportions, this retail expansion includes walkthrough stores and luxury boutiques, a new souvenir concept called Air de Paris, and stores in the arrivals halls designed to both showcase brands to passengers and remind them to shop on their way back. The refurbishment aims to inject some real French chic into the airport mix that the operator intends will compete significantly with shops in the city.
Seeing itself serving both the capital of design and the worldwide capital of tourism, the airport intends to showcase l’art de vivre in the areas of beauty, fashion and gastronomy with exclusive brands not found in other airports. A communications initiative in the major languages has begun to entice passengers, running alongside tour operators, taxi companies, hotels and bus companies to deliver the message. Overall, there will be an additional 35 per cent retail space in the two airports over the next three years.
Considering that at Aéroports de Paris just 37 per cent of revenues come from commercial activities, there is some way to go before it meets the airports of the world average of 50 per cent. But these changes should have a major impact, further upping the average spend considerably.
Other developments around the airport include an international trade centre and business complex combining conference and exhibition facilities, hotels and restaurants, to be completed next year; Aèroville, a 110,000 sq m retail complex designed by Philippe Chiambaretta, aimed at local residents as well as travellers, also due for completion in 2014; the Roissy-Gonesse Triangle, a major 450 ha urban, economic and environmental project that includes technology and service centre companies plus educational and cultural facilities; and Eurocarex, the future European high-speed rail freight service that will link the air terminals of Paris with those in Liege, Lyon, Amsterdam and Frankfurt by 2017.
The British branch is not planned to have any direct connections to any of London’s airports.
London’s last chance to redeem itself?
London is… well, JG Ballard claimed he liked living near Heathrow because he enjoyed its ‘perverse beauty’; however the rest of us suffer more and more, finding nothing beautiful about it at all, despite the billion pounds being invested on average every year from 2008 until 2014 upgrading its terminals. It needs to, facing as it does increasing competition. In 1999 Ballard could eulogise Heathrow’s concourses as ‘the ramblas and agoras of the future city’ and draw attention to the period charm of the old terminal buildings, ‘last survivors of the Festival of Britain’. Despite all the investment, many travellers consider it stuck in a time warp, hopelessly antiquated in comparison with the best to which it aspires. Operating at 99 per cent capacity is no excuse for its record-breaking figures for lost luggage.
The ad hoc expansion of most major airports has led to the mess of which Heathrow is a supreme example. Cue, at last, Foster, Halcrow and Volterra’s proposal for a Thames Hub project. In a country that champions the pragmatic, espouses the prudent, and avoids anything strategic and long term, this is thinking on a grand scale. In its grand scale it might almost be French. It is certainly very unBritish.
Neither could the original scheme that sparked interest in the Mayor of London – hence the nickname Boris Island, a site further out into the Thames estuary north-east of Whitstable – or the earlier Covell Matthews’ scheme off the Isle of Sheppey, between Boris Island and the Isle of Grain, where the latest idea is located.
There have been no fewer than 10 government studies since 1946 about the aviation capacity required to meet the needs of London. Five commercial airports currently do not serve the capital well. London Southend and London Ashford at Lydd may be added at will to the usual suspects. Even Manston in Kent may yet one day be developed. Stephen Walsh said: ‘Benchmark London Heathrow and other airports that have the London soubriquet with the best of the rest and they are truly an embarrassment that will only get worse unless we redevelop our terminal infrastructure and build a third runway at Heathrow or move to the Thames estuary.’ Frommer’s editor Jason Clampet says: "If a city has an excellent terminal it says to the visitor that they’re thought about. Cleanliness, good light, space to rest between flights, decent food and some strategically placed plugs are enough to say to visitors, "We know you’d rather be somewhere else right now, but while you’re here, we’ll take care of you".’ Such customer care is lacking at some of the worst terminals here in the UK.
Not surprisingly Heathrow draws typically trenchant comments from Walsh: ‘To my mind [it] has a last chance to redeem itself in the eyes of its global audience. T5 is a huge disappointment (as T4 was back in the early Eighties) and no amount of tinkering with the other terminals is going to deliver the sort of competitive customer experience that the New World is already used to or getting used to. Think Incheon, Dubai, Beijing, Singapore, and that’s just for now!’
His fears are born out by the figures: in 2011 Heathrow, still the third largest airport in the world after Atlanta and Beijing, had 31 weekly non-stop flights to China, whereas Schipol had 39, Frankfurt 56, and Paris 64, all airports that are expanding their connections to the largest emerging markets around the world, to where the IMF predicts global economic growth will take place in the next decade.
With business leaders demanding greater runway capacity, environmentalists warning that by 2050 carbon emissions must not exceed 2005 levels of 37.5 million tonnes a year, and local residents campaigning about noise and disruption, to which a fragile coalition government must factor in ballooning budget deficits and an economy gripped by recession, we have a conundrum. Simon Buck, chief executive of the British Air Transport Association has stated: ‘The Government recognises that it is vital for the economic recovery that we rebuild our international trade links’ while BAA has estimated that Britain could miss out on around £14bn in international trade in the next 10 years and 141,000 jobs could be lost if Heathrow has to continue with just two runways.
Incremental solutions at the existing sites will not be the answer. Some 134 million passengers a year are passing through all London’s airports. This has raised the spectre that Heathrow’s share of this somehow makes it ‘too big to fail’ and that ‘we are stuck with it’ in the words of John Stewart, chairman of Hacan ClearSkies, a west London residents’ pressure group. Heathrow saw for the first time 70 million passengers pass through its terminals in the 12 months to March 2012. Hardly ‘resilient’ to such increases in traffic as BAA chief executive Colin Matthews, would have us believe, Heathrow has become a place to avoid as potential delays to flight traffic couple with the unpredictability of the time required for security and immigration controls lengthen.
‘Born out of necessity, enthusiasm and frustration’ with all this, in the words of architect Norman Foster, at the end of 2011 his firm of architects together with Halcrow and Volterra launched its plan for a new hub, a £50bn project that included a new airport capable of handling 150 million passengers a year, a railway terminus serving a four-track, high-speed passenger and freight orbital route around London with direct links into both the capital and to continental European networks, a freight depot and port together with a new Thames Barrier. Intended to feed a ‘spine’ the length of the country that combines energy, communications and data, the Thames Hub is an integrated vision for the UK in an attempt to recapture the foresight and courage of the Victorian era with a plan to establish a modern transport and energy infrastructure for this century and beyond.
It would also reassert London’s geographical advantage between the Americas, Europe and Asia, which is gradually being eroded by new global hubs such as Dubai. Seen as critical to society and the country’s economic prosperity, bold is hardly the word, but as Walsh puts it: ‘London needs a new front-door airport in addition to the increasing number of back-door versions we have already.
‘Heathrow is a gateway and a gateway needs to deliver the choice, range and depth of air travel and customer service that, for example, our Asian friends are inventing for themselves year on year. You have to see and experience such facilities to understand their impact, and it cannot be that those that live under the flight path at Heathrow can hold Britain to ransom however understandable their motivations.
‘And if self-interest defeats the common good then let London have a new gateway airport in the Thames estuary or elsewhere but don’t let us bicker over it endlessly while others seize the initiative. If we want to maintain and grow our brand position in the world we need to demonstrate it, not fluff it. Maintaining and growing our brand means more arriving visitors spending more that in turn create jobs, but they have to get here and want to keep getting here to do so.’
American architect and urban planner Daniel Hudson Burnham, the Victorian who was behind the development plans for several US cities, wanted ‘magic to stir men’s blood’ in big ideas while acknowledging they probably wouldn’t be realised. While the Thames Hub certainly has power to stir the blood, huge infrastructure projects are usually particularly controversial, politically sensitive and enormously expensive. Foster stated at the launch of the plan that ‘the cost of not doing anything will ultimately be much higher’, reminding his audience that such ideas do not have to take a lifetime to implement.
‘In Hong Kong, a decade ago, we were able to build a major new international airport and all the associated infrastructure including a new island reclaimed from the sea within four years. If Britain wants to compete with rapidly developing global economies, it must sort out its infrastructure and, if this is holistically planned with real political commitment, it can also be a thing of beauty and environmentally friendly,’ he said. By insisting on the need for a national plan, one that aims to redress the imbalance of economies north and south, he also commented: ‘If it went ahead, even in part, the very realisation of the plan would create thousands of skilled jobs in engineering, manufacturing and construction alone.’
Yet the need to do something soon and the long-term potential benefits still come up against the short-termism of the political world. Landing an aircraft in a crosswind is a challenge, as is making a decision or where or whether to build a new runway. The political winds are gusty now and frequently gather strength when such plans are considered. Just as a coalition of the MoD and birdwatchers put paid to Harold Wilson’s plan for a new airport across the Thames estuary from the proposed hub at Maplin Sands in the Seventies so today we have a coalition of creatives highlighting the potential destruction of wildlife, with some not very good cartoons at #BirdsStrikeBack on Twitter.
By building the airport on a platform, like Chek Lap Kok and the new Doha airport, the location would allow flights to take off and land over water, significantly reducing the impact of noise and enabling round-the-clock operations. Given the ruling out in 2010 of expansion to Heathrow, the lack of enthusiasm for a new airport and the political paralysis in decision making, London may well be on its way to becoming a second-tier air hub.
Foster et al has its sights set on the horizon, building the infrastructure required for future greatness. A similarly grand vision came later in 2012 from Gensler for a floating ‘gateway to Europe’ in the estuary creating ‘a new standard for the world, minimising nuisance and maximising environmental benefits’, according to CEO Chris Johnson. We can only hope our leaders have an equally grand future vision.
Berlin – island city
In stark contrast to Paris and Heathrow, Berlin Tegel won the hearts of passengers from the day it opened – just a year after Charles de Gaulle. Simple, convenient, with few facilities and hardly any shops, it was possible to almost drive to your gate – well, within 30m. Brilliant! Yet by the time Tegel opened it was obsolete.
The short walk from the kerb to your gate won hearts but the dreams were to be crushed by security and retail. Not only was the walk to the check-in and gate short, there were no shops. In those days, travel was about speed, get-upand- go, no hanging around. The idea of being trapped in a shopping centre for two hours was then inconceivable. Now we have airports as destinations, places to spend time, do some shopping, stop at a cafe – commercial concerns trumping everything bar security. Now design is all about the flow of people, the longer the walk to the gate the more we can spend in the shops.
Niklas Maak, head of the art and architecture section of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said: ‘Tegel is an airport of another era, when people still believed in flight as a means of acceleration. The new [Berlin] airport is very professional, but it’s a new idea of an airport: as a place to spend time, do some shopping, go to a cafe, look at art.’ He adds: ‘Airport architecture is always metaphorical. Tegel looks l ike a spaceship – like the building itself might take off at any moment. The euphoria of the space age is inscribed in the architecture.’
The ‘drive to your gate’ architects were Meinhard von Gerkan and Volkwin Marg. A short-lived concept, the idea was developed further at Hamburg and Stuttgart, before its short life was hijacked by terrorism. However, the practice, founded in 1965, has gained four additional partners over the years, 12 associates and 500 staff, with three offices in China, four in Germany, and outposts in Doha and Rio, Moscow and Hanoi. It won the commission for the new airport of which Maak spoke. Berlin-Brandenburg Willy Brandt, due to open last June, then postponed to autumn 2013 (though technical problems with the fire safety system looks like further delaying that), is set to replace three airports: Tegel, Schönefeld, and Tempelhof. Costing around £2bn originally, Berlin’s new international airport is 2 ha shopping mall with some planes tacked on the back. Such is the way of the world.
This airport has been 20 years in the making and taken six years to build and is set to conclude another chapter in the of Germany, and one of the last building blocks to turn the capital into a world-class metropolis. But a devastating fire at Dusseldorf airport in 1996, in which 17 people died, is one reason German airport operators are not prepared to take any risks. Matthias Platzeck, the governor of Brandenburg, has promised a full investigation into the project’s disarray that has been criticised for a multitude of shortcomings. Rainer Brüderle, a member of the government ruling coalition admitted: ‘This is a major . embarrassment for Germany and the capital. It’s a sign that we haven’t got the most capable people at work on this.’
The rows that have accompanied the development, about everything from its location to the name, and disputes over the flight paths, construction delays, cost overruns, and the bankruptcy of the initial developer, have all made it bad news. Die Welt said Berlin was ‘the laughing stock of the world’ and the Berliner Morgenpost observed that ‘this mistake will cost millions. It’s a disaster’. It is all most unGerman. Even the number of check-in desks were insufficient, entailing an additional order.
Having seen the disastrous opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow, 10,000 volunteers have been drafted in to Berlin-Brandenburg supplementing its 20,000 staff to ensure the smooth running of the opening few months. Now, the extra logistical problems and the additional costs due to the delay are enormous. Hundreds of thousands of passengers have been issued with new tickets to the city’s old airports and the airlines, which are likely to lose millions through the delay, are seeking compensation.
Economically the new airport is essential for Berlin, a city that is still an island in the middle of nowhere. Florian Mausbach, a retired city planner summed it up when he said: ‘Other German cities are surrounded by industry. Berlin is surrounded by storks and wolves. The city is an island, and we need air bridges to the rest of the world.’ Mausbach said that personally he found Tegel very convenient. ‘But as a city planner you can’t just think of your own perspective,’ he added.
The Berlin dream airport has now really become transformed into a nightmare of politicised wrangling among leaders of debt-plagued local government. Against an opening postponed, at the latest count, four times, officials cite various technical and budgetary problems that have turned the airport – now estimated at more than £3.3bn, nearly £1bn over budget, from an emblem of German know-how into a source of local embarrassment.
… and lastly
The newDoha International Airport [NDIA] was due to open in December, but now that has been postponed to late this year. It will feature an artificial lagoon, a suitably Ozymandian concept by HOK for a city rising from obscurity with a skyline that resembles a cluster of spaceships. But as Stephen Walsh comments, lagoons do not an airport make.
‘NDIA has been a long time coming and has already been through several iterations…with future expansion already in the planning stage. I am sure Doha will be an uplifting experience for arriving and departing passengers but, rather like Dubai Terminal 3, probably only for a while,’ he says. ‘Qatar Airways and Emirates are the Middle East’s premier airlines and although growth has slowed, passenger numbers are continually increasing.
‘Airport planners and architects often fail to remember that people make the place. When people are relaxed and comfortable enjoyment becomes endemic but no amount of architectural wizardry, lagoons or other features will overcome the frustrations of terminals that just cannot cope with their volumes of passengers.
‘Such concepts might win architectural competitions at the outset but hold little relevance for passengers if they cannot find space in which to shop or snack, a vacant toilet or somewhere to sit and wait.’
The $15bn airport is set to employ 40,000 people and have an initial capacity of 24 million passengers a year, 70 per cent of whom will be transferring. Its capacity will more than double by 2020. The CEO of Qatar Airways, Akbar Al Baker, said that the new airport would be tested for six months before it opens to ensure there were no problems like T5 at Heathrow – the example everyone loves to cite.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Changi Airport has consistently won all those awards for best airport in the world.
‘It has long been a template for the optimum passenger experience,’ says Walsh. ‘Terminal 1 has been refurbished, Terminal 2 is about to be, Terminal 3 received heady acclaim when it opened in 2008 and a new Terminal 4 will no doubt seek to redefine the passenger terminal experience.
‘But it isn’t easy. Competition is rife and there are many new airports seeking the same crown. To stay ahead Changi will need to stick to its original core values and focus more on the passenger experience.’
