In Transit: What Airports Tell You About the Countries They Serve

Kathmandu airport deserves its own category. There are airports that are functional, airports that are impressive, airports that are a genuine pleasure to move through, and then there is Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International, which occupies a category I would describe as post-apocalyptic with charm. The terminal building communicates, structurally and atmospherically, the impression that someone once had ambitious plans for it and then ran out of either money or conviction about halfway through. The check-in area has the dimensions of a provincial bus station. The ceiling does something complicated with condensation that I did not investigate too closely. It is the only airport I have been to where clearing security involved someone looking at my bag with the expression of a person who has been asked to do something they regard as technically optional.

Nepal’s relationship with aviation has always been demanding. The country’s geography, thirteen of the world’s fourteen highest peaks sitting inside or on its borders, creates conditions that make landing and takeoff in the mountain regions a matter of what pilots call visual flight rules and what passengers call hoping for the best. The Tenzing-Hillary Airport at Lukla, the staging point for Everest expeditions, has a runway of around five hundred metres that ends at a cliff, which means there is no option other than a successful landing on approach, which is one way of concentrating the mind. Tribhuvan, by comparison, is relatively straightforward, sitting in the Kathmandu Valley at about 1,300 metres and surrounded by hills that require a specific approach pattern but nothing as definitively committed as Lukla.

I am writing this on a flight from Kathmandu to New Delhi, the first of two legs to Hanoi. The Delhi to Hanoi connection gives me fifteen minutes of transfer time, which the check-in agent at Tribhuvan had assessed with a slight widening of the eyes before printing the boarding pass without further comment. It turned out fine. A gentle jog through the terminal, the polite but clear intervention of a gate agent who had apparently seen this situation before, and I was on the plane.

It is the only airport I have been to where clearing security involved someone looking at my bag with the expression of a person who...

I have now been through twelve airports on this trip, which is not a number that qualifies as impressive by the standards of frequent international travellers but which has given me a working theory: the airport is the country’s first impression of itself, and countries vary enormously in what impression they have decided to make. Norman Foster’s Hong Kong airport, built on reclaimed land off Lantau, is a statement about the relationship between infrastructure and ambition, the kind of building that says we take the future seriously and we are prepared to build an island to prove it. Beijing Capital Airport, which I have now used twice, is genuinely one of the best-designed airports in the world, the Terminal 3 building conceived by Foster again for the 2008 Olympics, a structure of such fluid, uncluttered logic that arriving in it produces a mild and pleasant disorientation, as if the space is slightly larger than the laws governing airport architecture normally permit.

Heathrow, by contrast, communicates something more complicated, the air of a place that was once at the centre of things and is still operating on that assumption while the evidence suggests the assumption needs updating. The food is overpriced in a way that feels less like commerce than entitlement. The terminal connections involve the kind of logic that could only have been produced by decades of incremental decisions none of which were made with reference to the others. I say this as someone who is fond of it, in the way that you are fond of things that are frustrating and familiar in equal measure.

The Kathmandu to New Delhi flight was, by some margin, the most turbulent thing I have experienced on this trip, which is already a relatively high bar. The plane moved through the air in the manner of something that had not quite decided whether it wanted to be a plane or a fairground ride, the Himalayan weather systems doing things with the air currents that produced a series of drops and corrections that had the effect of reminding everyone on board of their mortality at intervals of roughly thirty seconds. I do not generally mind turbulence. I found this particular turbulence instructive.

Flying in Southeast and South Asia has recalibrated my understanding of what a plane journey can involve. The airlines here, the budget carriers that connect Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur, Manila to Beijing, Kathmandu to Delhi, are operating at a standard that is broadly comparable to European carriers while charging a fraction of the price, the economics made possible by lower labour costs and a regulatory environment that reflects the different economic conditions of the countries involved. The cheap flights that connect this part of the world have done something significant to how people in the region move. A flight from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur can cost less than thirty pounds on the right day and the right carrier. This has produced a form of regional mobility that did not exist two decades ago and is quietly changing what South and Southeast Asian cities look like, who lives in them seasonally, and how their economies relate to each other.

The New Delhi airport is, as I can confirm from fifteen minutes of vigorous transit, very large. The Hanoi airport is small and efficient and gave me no difficulty. And Caticlan, the airport that serves Boracay in the Philippines, is a strip of grass with a desk and a chair beside it for check-in, which is either the minimum viable airport or a reminder that the definition of aviation infrastructure is broader than the Foster terminals would suggest.

The scorpion I ate at Donghuamen three nights ago was, on reflection, the most alarming thing I have consumed in transit. The airports were manageable by comparison.

I am writing this on a flight from Kathmandu to New Delhi, the first of two legs to Hanoi.

Dave

A British ginger seeing the world one questionable decision at a time. Based wherever the wifi works.

In Transit: What Airports Tell You About the Countries They Serve

“Tribhuvan, by comparison, is relatively straightforward, sitting in the Kathmandu Valley at about 1,300 metres and surrounded by hills that require a specific approach pattern but nothing as definitively committed as Lukla.”

A gentle jog through the terminal, the polite but clear intervention of a gate agent who had apparently seen this situation before, and I was on the plane.

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A gentle jog through the terminal, the polite but clear intervention of a gate
agent who had apparently seen this situation before, and I was on the plane.