Ask the pilot

The pilot goes home again and uncovers the deeper meaning of airports.

By Patrick Smith

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March 17, 2006 | Air travel has influenced the architecture and design of our century to a perhaps greater degree than anything else, including even the automobile.

-- John Zukowsky, from "Building for Air Travel"

Begin with a pair of segmented elliptical pylons that soar 250 feet into the air. They are sand colored but often turn amber in the sunset. Trussed between them, two-thirds of the way up, is a six-story platform, like an office building hung between two great goalposts. Its shoulders taper inward, and perched at their apex, like the head of a giant robot, is a 12-sided cupola crowned by a porcupine array of antennae and radar dishes.

What I've just sketched is the control tower at my hometown airport, Boston's Logan International. That perhaps a few New Englanders out there recognized it pays homage to the structure's strangely iconic status as one of the most distinctive airport buildings in the world. I can't speak for anybody else, but whenever my plane lands at Boston and I glance up at that twin-trunked behemoth, I feel the warm flood of memory and a poignant sense of having arrived home.

People don't get sentimental much about airports anymore, and why should they? Some airports are engineering marvels; others hold honors of aerohistorical significance; still others are, if not exactly enjoyable, vibrant and colorful. But most are ordinary, cheerless, and frankly not very interesting. Of course, nostalgia is in the mind and memories of the beholder. Hong Kong's famous in-town airport, Kai Tak, was a dirty, claustrophobic snarl with approach paths that brought noisy jetliners within arm's reach of skyscrapers and apartments. But when the field closed eight years ago, hundreds of cheering citizens crowded onto rooftops to toast the last of the incoming planes. "Animated, cheerful souls," wrote one reporter, "absolutely passionate about their beloved airport." That all seems a bit much, but I understand where they were coming from.

If an airport has one aesthetic obligation, it's to impart a sense of place: you are here and nowhere else. Logan seems to do that quite well, though how much of that is me, and how much is the airport itself, is something I can't quite determine.

Finding out first entails a trip back in time, to the 16th floor of that twin-trunk control tower. On the bottom level of the tower's workspace -- either the first or 16th story, depending on how you see it -- used to reside one of Boston's most distinctive public spaces: the airport observation deck. I eulogized this perch in a column once before, but it's worth repeating: The spectacularly poised lookout featured opposing sides of knee-to-ceiling windows and, arguably, the best view in town. To the north and east was a commanding vista of terminals, runways and taxiways; to the south and west, a sweeping panorama of the Boston skyline and waterfront. It's a scant two miles from Logan's perimeter seawall to the center of downtown, and thus, from the 16th floor, you observed the city and its airport in a state of working symbiosis. From here, as an eighth grader in 1979, I saw Pope John Paul II touch down in a green and white Aer Lingus 747 named "St. Patrick," then watched his motorcade disappear into the Sumner Tunnel before emerging again downtown. Passengers relaxed on carpeted benches while kids and families came on the weekends, feeding coins into the mechanical binoculars, and picnicking on the floor. The idea of an airport evoking civic togetherness is hard to fathom these days, but the 16th floor possessed an element of that spirit, clinging to the now vanished idea of an airport as a destination unto itself, like a park or a museum.

The deck had its regulars, and as a young teenager I was one of them. My friends and I would hop the Blue Line at Wonderland and spend the better parts of Saturday and Sunday at Logan. The 16th floor was our office, where we'd check in to unpack bag lunches and plan the day's activities, which tended to blend our nerdier infatuations -- taking pictures, logging registration numbers of planes -- with the types of activities you might expect from adolescents: assorted rummaging, ransacking and troublemaking.

We navigated our turf with a kind of muscle-memory intimacy. We knew the keypad combinations to most of the secure areas and were on a first-name basis ("Here come those pain-in-the-ass kids again") with some of the airline ground staff. We'd sneak behind kiosks and dig through drawers and closets, helping ourselves to anything and everything affixed with an airline logo: stickers, stationery, boarding passes and timetables. (At home, most of this detritus was tossed into a large aluminum footlocker -- a stash of collectible aerobooty that would doubtless garner thousands on eBay had I not thrown it all away in the early 1980s.) The parking lot atop the original Terminal A, since demolished, was another prime zone for pranks. More than one Eastern 727 or DC-9 had its wings and tail bombarded with snowballs from our rooftop launching pad.

Getting onto parked aircraft was something we accomplished regularly and with little resistance. It was an easy process of meandering through security, then staking out an arriving flight. After everyone had disembarked, we'd request a cockpit tour from the agent or crew. Tired captains occasionally sent us down the Jetway unattended -- and it wasn't beyond us to wander aboard without asking. We'd sit in the cockpit, going through imaginary takeoffs or pretending to be aloft over the ocean somewhere. Safe to say that as a seventh grader I logged more time in the captain's seats of widebody jetliners than I ever will as an airline pilot. (Hunkered down over their desktop simulators, kids today think they have the edge on realism, but they will never savor the visceral thrill of moving the actual throttles, knobs and levers). Once bored with the flight deck, we'd head back to the cabin, loading up our backpacks with barf bags, magazines, briefing cards and cans of soda from the galley.

We'd guzzle down that soda and were careful to save the cans. After amassing a six-pack or two, it was back to the 16th floor. There, in the bathroom sink, we'd fill the cans with water before sneaking into the fire escape. Within the tower's north pylon, directly between the elevators, is a top-to-bottom spiral staircase. We'd learned to jimmy the door without triggering the alarm. Once inside, we'd lean over the railing and drop our water-filled cans the entire 200-plus-foot height of the shaft.

The cans would wobble, twist and twirl, depending on the angle at which we released them. Like a pitcher feeling out the seams of a baseball for a slider or a curve, we had the different trajectories down to a science: Hold it this way for a flat spin; tilt slightly for an end-over-end rotation. Off they'd go, and you'd hear the cans hissing as they accelerated toward terminal velocity, disappearing into a barely visible speck before hitting the concrete floor. Then came the sound, like a rifle shot echoing up the column. Often the cans would drift sideways and strike the lower floor railings or slam against the plumbing. Out of control, these wayward projectiles would ricochet madly, disintegrating in a white spray. Then we'd hop in the elevator for the post-crash investigation, marveling over the bizarrely crumpled cylinders and slivers of torn aluminum.

Over and over and over we'd let loose our water bombs, emerging only for occasional quick scans of the tarmac, lest we miss Lufthansa's daily departure for Frankfurt (flight 421, I still remember), or Swissair's DC-10 (flight 129). We'd also figured out a way, using wedges of cardboard, to raid the snack machines. Our heists were restricted to the lower shelves of the machines' rotating dispensers, where the vendors, apparently catching on, began stocking some of the world's most revolting treats. Back in Revere, my family's kitchen cabinets held a year's supply of stale Canada Mints that even our dog wouldn't eat.

Up on the 17th floor, incidentally, was a lounge called Cloud Nine. For us, as 14-year-olds, it was one of Logan's few decidedly off-limits spots, but itinerant fliers and off-duty employees were able to take in that same majestic view, enhanced by the buzz of an overpriced cocktail.

All of this is gone now. The observation deck, and Cloud Nine with it, were shuttered for good in 1989.

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