Airports are like little cities in many ways. Actually, big airports are like little cities, and little airports are more like villages, but in each case they represent microcosms of the cities they serve. In the case of major airports that means they come complete with hotels, restaurants, banks, stores, and an enormous underground, behind the scenes world that is almost organic in the way it maintains the life of the airport.
Airport names usually parallel the city they serve and also often include the name of someone honored: Washington National Airport, for instance, one of the oldest and most historic airports in the country, was recently renamed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. (There are many who still call it simply “Washington National,” for many different reasons.) Airports also have familiar three character identifiers: DCA for Reagan National, for instance, BOS for Boston, SFO for San Francisco. Smaller airports don’t get the full three letter treatment but are assigned three character codes: The airport where I began my career in aviation, LaFleur Airport, Northampton, Massachusetts, is 7B2. (It was renamed simply Northampton Airport after Larry LaFleur sold it, but the identifier is still 7B2.)
Major airports also have a four letter ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) identifier, an internationally standardized method of identifying major airports. (Or sort of standardized, anyway. As usual in aviation matters, the United States, partially for historical reasons, and partially because we’re just so big and tend to get our way, usually does things a little differently.) The ICAO standard divides the world into regions: Northern Europe is a region, for instance, southern Europe, called Lower Europe, another. Then within each region there are countries, and within each country are airports. The first letter in the ICAO system represents the region, E for Northern Europe, L for Lower Europe, for instance, and the second letter represents the country: G for Great Britain, D for Deutschland, I for Ireland. The problem of having two countries that begin with the same letter is solved by putting them in separate regions: Ireland, Italy and Iceland all get I’s, but Ireland is in the E region, Italy is in the L region, and Iceland is in the B region. Thus Irish airport identifiers all begin with EI ,Italian with LI, and Icelandic with BI.
The last two letters stand for the city, which means that if we assume all 26 letters are available, then 26 times 26 equals 676, and that is the maximum number of airport identifiers available in each country. Thus Shannon Airport becomes EINN, Rome Fiumicino is LIRF, LFPG is Paris Charles DeGaulle, and EDDF is Frankfurt International. With a little bit of familiarity with international airports and some creative guesswork, you can often figure out the airports from the identifiers alone: LIRA means Lower Europe, specifically Italy, and RA is for Rome’s Ciampino Airport (Roma, in Italian, hence RA.) LEMD is also Lower Europe, but the country is Spain (the E in LEMD is for Espana; the names of the countries are in the language of that country), and the city is Madrid. Okay, maybe it takes a lot of familiarity and guesswork, but there is a system.
North America has a somewhat different system. North America is divided into three regions, Canada with a C, Mexico with an M, and the United States with a K. (I’m sure there’s a reason for the K, maybe even a good one, but it doesn’t jump right out at me.) What we also got was not having to use the region, country, two letter airport system, but instead got to add the common three letter identifier to the K. Thus Washington National, DCA, became KDCA, Los Angeles KLAX, Detroit KDTW, and so on. And KDTW is where our story comes in.
If airports are actually small cities themselves, then it stands to reason that life’s comings and goings also happen there, just as they do elsewhere. And not always for the better. One particular incident stands out in my mind, one that made clear to me that airports are more than just places for airplanes to takeoff and land. I had just gotten back to Detroit, my base at the time (full name Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, KDTW), after having done a “Vegas Turn.” I was riding the employee parking bus, useful also for connecting between terminals—I was on my way to another terminal to get a jump seat ride home. The bus stopped at the main entrance to the Northwest terminal and I saw a bunch of Northwest flight attendants standing outside at the curb as we pulled up, waiting for the bus. I also saw a middle aged, very nicely dressed woman standing there with two other women standing on either side of her, sort of supporting her. The woman in the middle had her hands to her face and was staring somewhat upward, off into space, with a look on her face that was hard to identify, something between confusion and concentration.
The doors opened to the bus, the Northwest flight attendants got on, lots of noise, bags being dragged up the steps, scrambling for seats, shouts of recognition from other Northwest flight attendants already on the bus, and in the midst of all this commotion one of the flight attendants who had just gotten on said, “Did you see that woman on the curb back there? She just found out her son had been killed.”
Then it got real quiet. In an instant we all went from thinking about the day behind us and getting home, to a realization of what we had just witnessed. And I knew I would never again see the entrance to that terminal without seeing that woman’s face.
