Airports

I fly regularly occasionally for both business and pleasure, and I usually end up going through Atlanta. There’s an old joke that runs “If you live in the South, when you die you may go to Heaven, or you may go to Hell. But first you have to change planes in Atlanta.”


On my most recent trip I had a layover of several hours. This was okay by me, as I like airports. Looking out the windows to watch planes come and go, the complex choreography of flight operations is entertainment to me. Rows of planes lined up at the gates or on the runways, each one costing tens of millions of dollars. The range and power of the information technology: tracking hundreds of flights and millions of passengers, and updating critical information automatically on the monitors throughout the terminal.  Then there is the people watching, which is a sport unto itself.

Airports have a density of commerce, capital, and people that is only rivaled by the skyscrapers of Manhattan or Chicago.

But on my last trip through, I noticed how little value added activity is being conducted. Obviously, the place is a beehive of activity. Outside the terminal, workers swarm around the jets, fueling them, fixing them, even a few loading and unloading baggage (most people carry on their luggage these days). Inside the terminal, it seems less organized, with passengers trying not to run into each other as they rush from gate to gate. Although, even inside the terminal there is structure, as people line up to get food, or to board planes. It may just be my imagination, but the line for Starbucks is calmer than the scrum to get on some of the flights.

The thing is, all this activity, this hurried coming and going, but very little new wealth is being created. A lot of wealth is being redistributed. Money flows from the passengers to the airlines and businesses at the airport. Those businesses then pay their employees and suppliers. Money is moving. The most visible symbol of the wealth redistribution is when one of those big jets takes off. Tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment, headed for someplace else.  But redistribution is not the same as creation.

The reality is that wealth is being destroyed at airports. An enormous amount of food and fuel goes to feed the metabolisms of people and the giant machines that serve them. Machinery and buildings depreciate. In many ways the ability to easily and relatively cheaply deliver people across vast distances, even across continents is one of the high points of our technological culture.

But the wealth that enables this process has to be generated elsewhere.