The Quiet Airport
Travel is already harrowing enough an experience. What if an airport invested more into acoustical engineering instead of subpar eateries?
I love airports—through my QC20s (and hopeful Bose makes some QC30s).
The travel experience is loud, anxiety inducing, and in some cases torturous. Most airports aren’t designed for travellers—but designed for the airplanes. Is about “How many gates can we get in?”, not “How can we get people to enjoy this space?” I get it—airports aren’t designed for us to hangout in them anymore. Especially in the post-9/11 era when it takes an hour to get through security just to get to the promised land.
I’ve been to some of the largest airports in the world—Heathrow, Buenos Aires, Bangkok (which has a golf course between runways)—and the one that inspired me the most was Hong Kong. Not because of the bus ride to get to the city, but because of how quiet it was.
Everything sounded like a whisper in the main terminal!
Here was an airport designed for quiet—designed for the volume of passengers they know they’re going to take. How many regional or major airports are designed with the same thing in mind? At least Honolulu mixes outdoor and indoor—it’s absolutely gorgeous to see a spring storm work through the airport.
But how many airports are designed to be quiet?
A quiet airport is an airport we will always enjoy. It would be an airport we would hate to leave to embrace the jet noise of our flight.
If Acura can do sound dampening in their cars—why can’t we expect similar in one of the loudest places we’ll frequent? We don’t need the 12th man present every time we’re flying.
Why do I need to put my QC20s in when I’m working my way through the lines and getting to the gate?
It could be an amazing experience—imagine a Terminal designed for noise suppression (even not having PA systems and putting everything on info screens). Then you could add in active noise canceling/dampening throughout the airport with a powerful Bose system. Combine that with sound arresting fixtures and access points that either trap or isolate sound—airports would substantially reduce anxiety with every decibel that drowned, dispersed, or dampened.
If an airport could drop it’s sound by 20 decibels—it would be an incredibly different experience.
Now if we could convince red-eye flights to go completely lights out….
