Entry into the vast space of the departures hall heralded the opportunity, characteristic in the transport nodes of the modern world, to observe people with discretion, to forget oneself in a sea of otherness and to let the imagination loose on the limitless supply of fragmentary stories provided by the eye and ear. The mighty steel bracing of the airport’s ceiling recalled the scaffolding of the great nineteenth-century railway stations, and evoked the sense of awe – suggested in paintings such as Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare – that must have been experienced by the first crowds to step inside these light-filled, iron-limbed halls pullulating with strangers, buildings that enabled a person to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity.
The roof of the building weighed 18,000 tonnes, but the steel columns supporting it hardly suggested the pressures they were under. They were endowed with a subcategory of beauty we might refer to as elegance, present whenever architecture has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. On top of their tapered necks, the columns balanced the 400-metre roof as if they were holding up a canopy made of linen, offering a metaphor for how we too might like to stand in relation to our burdens.
Most passengers were bound for a bank of automatic check-in machines in the centre of the hall. These represented an epochal shift away from the human hand and towards the robot, a transition as significant in the context of airline logistics as that from the washboard to the washing machine had once been in the domestic sphere. However, few users seemed capable of producing the precise line-up of cards and codes demanded by the computers, which responded to the slightest infraction with sudden and intemperate error messages – making one long for a return of the surliest of humans, from whom there always remains at least a theoretical possibility of understanding and forgiveness.
Nowhere was the airport’s charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau … all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation.
5 A few zones of the check-in area remained dedicated to traditionally staffed desks, where passengers were from the start assured of interaction with a living being. The quality of this interaction was the responsibility of Diane Neville, who had worked for British Airways since leaving school fifteen years before and now oversaw a staff of some two hundred who dispensed boarding cards and affixed luggage labels.
It was never far from Diane’s thoughts how vulnerable her airline was to its employees’ bad moods. On reaching home, a passenger would remember nothing of the plane that had not crashed or the suitcase that had arrived within minutes of the carousel’s starting if, upon politely asking for a window seat, she had been brusquely admonished to be happy with whatever she was assigned – this retort stemming from a sense on the part of a member of the check-in team (perhaps discouraged by a bad head cold or a disappointing evening at a nightclub) of the humiliating and unjust nature of existence.
In the earliest days of industry, it had been an easy enough matter to motivate a workforce, requiring only a single and basic tooclass="underline" the whip. Workers could be struck hard and with impunity to encourage them to quarry stones or pull on their oars with greater enthusiasm. But the rules had had to be revised with the development of jobs – by the early twenty-first century comprising the dominant sector of the market – that could be successfully performed only if their protagonists were to a significant degree satisfied rather than resentfully obedient. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to wheel elderly passengers around a terminal, for example, or to serve meals at high altitudes could not profitably be sullen or furious, the mental well-being of employees began to be a supreme object of commercial concern.
Out of such requirements had been born the art of management, a set of practices designed to coax rather than simply extort commitment out of workers, and which, at British Airways, had inspired the use of regular motivational training seminars, gym access and free cafeterias in order to achieve that most calculated, unsentimental and fragile of goals: a friendly manner.
But however skilfully designed its incentive structure, the airline could in the end do very little to guarantee that its staff would actually add to their dealings with customers that almost imperceptible measure of goodwill which elevates service from mere efficiency to tangible warmth. Though one can inculcate competence, it is impossible to legislate for humanity. In other words, the airline’s survival depended upon qualities that the company itself could not produce or control, and was not even, strictly speaking, paying for. The real origins of these qualities lay not in training courses or employee benefits but, for example, in the loving atmosphere that had reigned a quarter of a century earlier in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and humour – all so that today, without any thanks being given to those parents (a category deserving to be generally known as the true Human Resources department of global capitalism), he would have both the will and the wherewithal to reassure an anxious student on her way to the gate to catch BA048 to Philadelphia.
6 But even true friendliness was not always enough. I observed a passenger running with shoulder bags towards a check-in desk for a Tokyo flight, only to be courteously informed that he had arrived too late to board and would have to consider alternatives.
Yet his 747 had not already departed – it would sit at the terminal for a further twenty minutes, its fuselage visible through the windows. The problem was a purely administrative one: the airline had stipulated that no passenger, even one awaited by a bride and two hundred guests, could be issued with a boarding card less than forty minutes before departure.
The presence of the aircraft combined with its unreachability, the absence of another seat on a flight for forty-eight hours, the cancellation of a day of meetings in Tokyo, all these pushed the man to bang his fists on the counter and let out a scream so powerful that it could be heard as far away as the WH Smith outlet at the western end of the terminal.
I was reminded of the Roman philosopher Seneca’s treatise On Anger, written for the benefit of the Emperor Nero, and in particular of its thesis that the root cause of anger is hope. We are angry because we are overly optimistic, insufficiently prepared for the frustrations endemic to existence. A man who screams every time he loses his keys or is turned away at an airport is evincing a touching but recklessly naïve belief in a world in which keys never go astray and our travel plans are invariably assured.
Given Seneca’s analysis, it was ominous to note the direction that the airline was taking in its advertising. It was promising ever more confidently to try its very best to serve, to please and to be punctual. As a result, in an industry as vulnerable to disaster as this one, there were surely many more screams to come.