Airports and testicles

Now your average bloke would consider that having testicles is a sign of manhood. It’s no different for cities or towns either; they seem to need an airport to prove they are manly or important or whatever. And what is more, these airports need international destinations just to show that they are really important and big boys.

The really important airports of the world just have prosaic names like Amsterdam Schiphol or London Heathrow. It’s the Mickey Mouse ones that have to insert the word ‘International’ into their names – you know Newcastle International Airport or Cardiff-Wales International Airport. You see the word ‘International’ just raises the testosterone level. Yet you know that the former are truly international airports with flights travelling the globe every 5 or 10 minutes. Meanwhile the latter are dining out on charter flights and the occasional scheduled flight to a foreign country. I suspect that half of British airports would lose the ‘International’ appellation if KLM Cityhopper collapsed. But then maybe not, for a weekly charter flight to Alicante would give them just reason to keep the title.

Bristol airport isn’t bad; in fact I quite like it. Apart from all the usual domestic/charter flights, it has a regular flight to Newark in New Jersey, by Continental – I’ve used it much. But Newark is not good enough for Bristol Airport cus let’s face it, many have never heard of Newark. No, it is promoted as a flight to New York for that sounds far more important and gives the airport real balls. The fact that it is across the Hudson River and in New Jersey is ignored.

A sign of the way that Bristol feels about this flight comes at check in. They ask you so many questions; they look at every page of your passport. I guess it’s a special event for them; for me it’s just tedious. None of their frigging business if I have been to Uzbekistan.

Newark Liberty is a fine airport with better connections to Manhattan than JFK or La Guardia. Why not promote it as the gateway to New York? Tell them about the Olympia bus service or the Amtrak to Penn Central. Or indeed a gateway to the whole of the USA with a decent monorail connection between terminals? So none of that walking/taking the bus crap we get at Heathrow.

These regional airports need to grow up. The ones I have used, even Exeter, have no need to say ‘International.’