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The Airport Lounge Crisis

UPDATE: February 12, 2023

MAYBE MY EXPECTATIONS are out of whack, but I’ve always thought the airport lounge was supposed to be an exclusive sort of place. A place of luxury and comfort, where premium class passengers could escape the noise and bustle of the terminal. In my younger days, before I could afford to travel in the forward cabins, I’d walk past those smoked-glass doorways and think, wow, it must be pretty luxe in there. I mean, isn’t that the point?

Well, as anyone who travels regularly and visits these lounges will attest, this is increasingly not the case.

The main issue is overcrowding. Lounges are often so jam-packed that customers are turned away or asked come back later on. I’ve seen lines going halfway down the concourse. If you do get in, there’s nowhere to sit and noise levels are off the charts.

One night I’m at the airport in Bangkok, at the Thai Airways’ Royal Orchid Lounge, which is shared by the various Star Alliance members. For me access to the lounge is part of the whole premium class experience, and so I left the hotel early to enjoy it. In the entryway vestibule, everything is peaceful, elegant and quiet. The hostess scans my boarding card and welcomes me. But when I turn the corner into the main hallway, everything changes. There must be five-hundred people inside. Literally every seat is taken. There’s trash all over the floor and it’s louder than a football stadium.

After standing around for ten minutes I finally score a seat. I’m wedged between four other visitors. My table is cluttered with the last person’s cups and plates, but if I wait for it to be cleaned, someone else will grab it. There are kids everywhere, and they will not shut up: yelling and crying and running around like it’s recess on the school playground.

The centerpiece of this chaos is an obnoxious guy in a Russian soccer shirt and his belligerent offspring. He’s something of a Vladimir Putin lookalike, sprawled sockless on a sofa with his naked feet hanging over the rail, playing a game on his phone. Around him is a spray of plastic toys deposited by his five — count ’em, five — preschool-age children, shrieking and throwing chips at each other. Every so often Vlad claps his hands and scolds them in lazily indignant Russian. They ignore him and carry on.

And here come the waitstaff with their carts. They’re flinging dishes into the bin, rapid-fire, and it’s BANG, CLANG, SMASH, BANG, SMASH, CLANG.

I try not to let it get to me. I distract myself with the buffet, helping myself to a gin and tonic, a miniature pastry-pillow labeled “chicken roll,” and some finger sandwiches made with institutional-looking white bread. But it’s so noisy and crowded that it’s impossible to relax. At one point I look up and can hardly believe my eyes. Walking past me is a mom and her two year-old toddler… in a diaper.

The photo at the top of this post was taken at the Aspire lounge (shared by multiple carriers) at Amsterdam-Schiphol. Every seat was occupied and the morning sun was blasting through the unshaded windows, heating the room like a sauna. At least a dozen babies could be counted, half of whom were shrieking at any given time, while a group of rambunctious, slightly older kids ran amok, throwing themselves over the furniture. Aside from the free food — which kept running out — what exactly was the advantage of being here versus any random spot in the terminal?

Silly me. I remember the first time I stepped into the Cathay Pacific business lounge in Hong Kong, and how, not knowing better, I was literally nervous. I had this idea that I was stepping into some rarefied chamber of privilege where everyone inside would look like like James Bond. I’d be seen as an interloper and asked to leave. Instead, here was a room overflowing with the same people you’d see in any shopping mall, most of them younger than me, in cargo shorts and ballcaps, jostling with baby strollers and wolfing down beer and noodles.

I was in the Avianca lounge at Miami International not long ago. There was a guy, early thirties, sitting across from me, with his headphones cranked so high that everybody within fifty feat could sing along. The music was obnoxious enough, but then I noticed his t-shirt. It was black and emblazoned with two simple words in large block letters. It said… well, here’s a picture of it:

If that’s not an indicator of just how far air travel — even premium class air travel — has fallen, I don’t know what is.

This is by no means across the board, of course. It’s hit or miss, depending on the airport, the airline, and the time of day. The trend, though, isn’t a good one. There are a lot more loud, dirty, and overcrowded ones these days than pleasant or luxurious ones. What was intended to be a place of comfort and relaxation has become a cross between a day-care center and a cafeteria.

The cause is twofold. For one, more people are flying than ever before, in all classes, and/or with whatever mileage or frequent flyer status gets you in. The bigger factor, though, is the rapidly growing number of folks using third-party perks to gain entry. Credit cards, mainly. There’s American Express platinum, for example, and a host of others granting entry through the Priority Pass program.

I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but the number of people accessing lounges via credit card has exploded since the end of COVID. Four years ago the crowds and noise were bad enough. Now the problem is significantly worse. Somehow, in the middle of a pandemic, millions of people went out and acquired high-end cards with huge annual fees.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I’m as guilty of this as anybody, my Priority Pass benefits getting me into the same lounges I’m apt to then complain about.)

I should point out, too, that the same thing is happening in hotels. Have you been to the executive lounge in a Marriott or a Hilton or a Hyatt lately? A topic for another time, maybe, but the mechanics of the issue are no different.

This won’t be an easy one to fix. There aren’t many options aside from tightening up entry qualifications or building bigger lounges. The latter is difficult, if often impossible. The former risks alienating a large number of customers who’ve gotten used to easy entry.

Airline lounges restricted only to premium class passengers do exist, but carriers make a lot of money from those credit card deals, so I don’t see the Priority Pass situation getting better. One idea would be for the card-issuers to increase their yearly fees, seeking out that sweet spot where the number of customers who drop out would be offset by the higher premiums.

I’m not optimistic. Look at airport security as an example, whereby a tediously inconvenient, jury-rigged system became the new normal. Sure there’s PreCheck, but the basic structure of the system is irrational and frankly chaotic. If you could time-travel back twenty years and describe our security protocols to a passenger, he or she wouldn’t believe you. The whole thing would be seen as ridiculous and unacceptable. Yet here we are.

It’s amazing what we grow accustomed to and eventually accept with a shrug. The lounge, as a place of luxury and quiet, may be yet another relic of the past.

 

Ask the Pilot lounge awards…

BEST: The Emirates first class lounge in Dubai, concourse A. The private boarding bridges, the gourmet food, sumptuous surroundings and complimentary massage. Where to start? And no, your AmEx ain’t getting you in here.

Dubai Decadence.

MOST DISAPPOINTING: The Wingtips lounge at JFK’s terminal 4. Another of those shared lounges, which tend to be worse than the airline-specific ones, this is a singularly awful space. Cramped seating, noisy kids, rickety unwashed tables, and it’s always a hundred degrees inside. As for the food…

Bon appétit !

 

All photos by the author.

Related Stories:

FIRST CLASS, LOW CLASS, NO CLASS. THE PASSENGER HALL OF SHAME
THE SCOURGE OF INFLIGHT GARBAGE
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH AIRPORTS?

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September 22, 2018 · Filed under 4

The De-Ice Man Cometh

Snow, Ice, and Airplanes. Everything You Need to Know About the Travails of Winter Flying.

2024 Version.

Deiceman

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN: snowstorms, cancellations, the sights and sounds of that weird fluid splattering off the fuselage…

 

On the Ground:

Parked at the terminal, ice, snow, or frost accumulates on a plane the same way it does on your car. But while a cursory brushing or scraping is a safe-enough remedy for driving, it doesn’t work for flying, when even a quarter-inch layer of frozen material can alter airflow around the wing—highly important during takeoff, when speed is slow and lift margins are thin. The delicious-looking spray used to clean it away is a heated combination of propylene glycol alcohol and water. Different mixtures, varying in temperature, viscosity, and color, are applied for different conditions, often in combination: a plane will be hit with so-called Type I fluid (orange) to get rid of the bulk of accumulation, then further treated with Type IV (greenish), a stickier substance that wards off additional buildup.

While it might appear casual to the passenger, the spraying procedure is a regimented, step-by-step process. Pilots first follow a checklist to ensure their plane is correctly configured. Usually the flaps and slats will be lowered to the takeoff position, with the APU providing power and the main engines shut down. The air-conditioning units will be switched off to keep the cabin free of fumes. When deicing is complete, the ground crew tells the pilots which types of fluid were used, as well as the exact time that treatment began. This allows us to keep track of something called a “holdover time.” If the holdover time is exceeded before the plane has a chance to take off, a second round of spraying may be required. The length of the holdover depends on the kind of fluids used, plus the rate and type of active precipitation (dry snow, wet snow, ice pellets; light, moderate, heavy). We have charts to figure it all out.

Deicing fluid isn’t especially corrosive, but neither is it the most environmentally friendly stuff in the world. And although it resembles apple cider or a tropical fruit puree, I wouldn’t drink it; certain types of glycol are poisonous. At upward of $5 a gallon, it is also very expensive. When you add in handling and storage costs, relieving a single jet of winter white can cost several thousand dollars. A growing number of airports recycle deicing fluid. It’s a complicated process, but it beats letting the goop seep into the water table or drain into lakes and rivers.

Another method is to tow aircraft into specially built hangars equipped with powerful, ceiling-mounted heat lamps. JetBlue has such a hangar at JFK. In some ways this is a greener technique, though it uses hideous amounts of electricity.

 

In the Air:

Under the right combination moisture and temperature, icing also can occur during flight. It tends to build on the forward edges of the wings and tail, around engine inlets, and on various antennas and probes. Left unchecked, it can damage engines, throw propeller assemblies off balance, and disrupt the flow of air over and around the wing. In a worst-case scenario, it can induce a full-on aerodynamic stall.

The good news is that all commercial aircraft are equipped with devices to keep these areas clean. On propeller-driven planes, pneumatically inflated “boots” will break ice from the leading edges of the wings and horizontal tail. On jets, hot air from the engine compressors is ducted to the wings, tail, and engine intakes. Windshields, propeller blades, and the different probes and sensors are kept warm electrically. These systems use redundant power sources and are separated into independently functioning zones to keep any one failure from affecting the entire plane.

Airframe ice comes in three basic types: rime, clear, and mixed. Rime is the most frequent one, appearing as a sort of white fuzz. The rate at which ice accretes is graded from “trace” to “severe.” Severe icing, usually associated with freezing rain, can be a killer. It’s also very rare, and it tends to exist in thin bands that are easy to avoid or fly out of. On the whole, inflight icing is considerably more of a threat to smaller, noncommercial planes than it is to airliners. Even in the heaviest precipitation, seeing more than a trace amount of rime on a jet is uncommon.

Planes also have sophisticated anti-skid systems to help deal with slick runways. And if you’ve looked closely, you’ve seen that most runways are cut laterally by thousands of thin grooves, spaced inches apart, to help with traction. When it’s icy or snowy we get braking reports, graded 1-5, or from “good” to “nil,” prior to taking off or landing. Anything below a 2, or if described as worse than “poor,” and the runway essentially becomes unusable. Slippery conditions reduce the amount of crosswind we’re allowed to take of or land with, and a runway will be further off-limits if the depth of snow or slush exceeds a certain value. It varies by aircraft type and carrier-specific rules, but more than about three inches of dry snow on a runway, or a half-inch of the wet stuff, and you aren’t going anywhere until it’s plowed.

I’ve made my share of wintry-weather landings. One thing that always surprises me is the way in which fresh snowfall can make a runway difficult to see and align yourself with. In normal conditions the runway sits in stark contrast to the pavement, grass, or whatever else is around it. When it’s snowing, everything is white. Runways are outfitted with an array of color-coded lighting. Most of the time you pay only cursory attention to these displays. That is, until the moment you break from a low overcast, just a few hundred feet over the ground with a half-mile of visibility, and find yourself confronted with a landscape of undifferentiated whiteness. Those lights and colors are suddenly very helpful.

 

Accidents and Incidents:

There have been tragedies over the years in which planes attempted takeoff with iced-over wings. Most recent was a 1992 USAir incident at LaGuardia. Nine years earlier was the infamous Air Florida disaster in Washington, DC, when in addition to ignoring buildup on the wings, the crew failed to run the engine anti-ice system, allowing frozen probes to give faulty thrust readings. On Halloween night in 1994, sixty-eight people died aboard American Eagle flight 4184 — a crash attributed to a design flaw, since rectified, in the ATR-72’s deicing system. Other planes have gone skidding off the end of snowy runways. Culprits have included erroneous weather or braking data, an unstable approach continued when it should have been broken off, the occasional malfunction, or any combination of those things.

I can’t tell you there will never be another ice-related accident. But I can assure you that airlines and their crews take the issue a lot more seriously than they used to. We’ve learned a lot — much of it the hard way — and this has carried over into a mindset, and more careful procedures, that leave little to chance.

If it seems like the effects of winter storms become worse, that’s because they have. When I was a kid growing up near Boston, a few inches of snow at Logan Airport meant almost nothing. Nowadays, the slightest dusting and the airport goes bonkers with cancellations and delays. What’s happened, for one, is that the amount of air traffic has more than doubled since then. In the 1980s, closing a runway for 35 minutes for plowing had comparatively mild repercussions. Today, hundreds of flights are impacted.

Airlines also have become more conservative when bad weather looms, preemptively readjusting their schedules before the brunt of any storm moves in. This is unfortunate if you’re one of those whose flight is canceled in advance, but things would be a lot worse, for a lot of people, had the airline attempted to push through. And what’s happening in one part of the country affects flights, and their passengers, further down the chain, in cities across the nation and the world. Drawing down the operation in one location protects passengers elsewhere.

When it gets bad, airline workers don’t enjoy the chaos any more than passengers do. Pilots and flight attendants often live in cities far from their crew bases, and have to fly in to catch their assignments. With a storm looming, that means leaving many hours early — sometimes a day or more ahead of schedule. Or, on the back end, we can find ourselves unable to get home again until things return to normal.

Once in a while, though, the timing works to our advantage. How do you turn what was supposed to be a 24-hour European layover in into a six-day vacation, as happened to me a couple of winters ago? Easy, just send a snow hurricane roaring through the Northeast. While the rest of you were stranded on tarmacs, sleeping under benches and sucking on discarded Chick-fil-A wrappers, I was sightseeing and sipping hot chocolate.

Not to rub it in or anything.

 

Iceman photo by the author.

“When you’re sitting on the tarmac while a guy in a hovering pod floats over you, twin beams of light piercing the murk of de-icing fluid. That’s my airplane fantasy. I want to be that guy!”

— Peter Hughes, Ask the Pilot fan and bassist for the Mountain Goats.

 

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December 10, 2015 · Filed under 4