SFO Quiet Airport (2025)(viewfromthewing.com) |
SFO Quiet Airport (2025)(viewfromthewing.com) |
Whenever I have an overnight layover in any of these airports I now pack NIOSH certified ear muffs, along with an eye mask.
I look ridiculous, but I don’t care.
Male PA Announcer: The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in a white zone.
...
Every single SaaS product seemed to have a dozen onboarding floating modals that need to be dismissed. It would have been impossible to read them all. In most cases I had used the product a lot before but I simply had a new corporate email so they thought I was a new user.
So if any said anything important I wouldn’t know because I had to dismiss them all.
At SFO: "Welcome to San Francisco! Please feel free to relax in our yoga and meditation rooms."
At DTW: "Welcome to Detroit. Remember to cover your face when you sneeze."
Totally different vibes.
SFO: "Use our AI startup!"
DCA: "Buy our warship!"
Interesting, the directors of Airplane! couldn't get actors with "authenticity" for the anouncers, so they hired the actual LAX announcers.
This is my current favorite airport album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orph%C3%A9e_(album)
> intent of defusing the anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal as an alternative to "canned" Muzak and easy listening styles.
I flew into the Orange County Airport before they tore it down and made it like the others. Felt very civilized. As I get older I find the hostile public spaces and infrastructure more and more annoying.
(I think that all the Canadian airports might be similarly quiet, but I haven't flown through them recently so I'm not entirely sure)
Personally 1/1 has been absolutely sublime for me as a tool for meditation, but I don't know that I could imagine it in an airport.
Thanks for that article, love to read about well intended design being poorly received.
Is this a regular thing?!
SFO's quiet airport policy is described on page 17 of this document: https://www.flysfo.com/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025-10%2...
Here are two quotations from that policy, directly relevant to the situation I described:
"The playing of music is prohibited in the following locations: at the podiums, ticket counters, and seating areas adjacent to gates"
"employees may not use mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets, in “speaker mode” in any public area of the Airport"So many airports direct passenger flow through a shopping zone drenched in perfume fumes. Disgusting as far as I'm concerned.
Not to mention the screaming visual pollution of course.
I don’t particularly care if someone shuts up an obnoxious, unused piece of equipment. The armed federal hall monitors running the place probably see it differently.
If I could walk from the plane to the luggage area and my luggage was already there 90% of the time, I probably would check more things.
However, the US airports simply don't employ enough people to move the luggage around fast enough.
The is 100% correctable by employing more people. But some CEO needs another yacht, so they don't. So, I simply don't check luggage.
He retired not too long ago. I know because it was notable enough to deserve a feature in the NY Times.
Given how I grew up relatively close to here from a regional perspective (in the Boston area), I was not at all prepared for just how many specific cultural references there are in New York that I would not be familiar with. My in-laws were mildly scandalized by the fact that I had not heard of "Fudgie the Whale" when the topic came up in the first year my wife and I dated.
Here, the infamous one are these James Wang, Esq ads on the placemats for Chinese restaurants in the area. I suspect he placed the ad 20 years ago but they never bothered to change the design...