In this bittersweet portrait of JFK International, author James Kaplan tries to figure out why this romanticized airport, built in the 1940s as dreamy Idlewild and once epitomizing the glamour of aviation and the promise of a muscular postwar America, is now seen as a spiritless monstrosity to be avoided. As Kaplan asks in _B_The Airport: Terminal Nights and Runway Days at John F. Kennedy International b (278 pages. Morrow. $23), “Where are sunlight, grandeur, beauty, mystery, philanthropy, welcome, awe?”
Kaplan doesn’t find a great deal at “this colossal, reedy, asphalty, garbagy plot by the bay” – which happens to be the size of Manhattan. Each year some 30 million people pass through JFK; 44,000 people work there daily. Of course, it’s hard to remain glamorous when so many passengers are commonfolk playing the deregulated airfare-war game. Or loads of “Swedish kids with backpacks” and Third World immigrants. It also doesn’t help that muddled bureaucrats are in charge. Or, as Yogi Berra might say, there are so many airlines they’ve all folded. In other words, the airport as metaphor for society.
Kaplan tells his story through portraits of devoted airport employees – some of whom he lets wax on pointlessly about how things have changed. The Birdman of Kennedy rides around the airport scaring off seagulls by playing a tape of a distressed gull or by shooting blanks. There’s Jerry Biscardi, who knows everything about fuel consumption at the airport – but can’t tell you what he pays for oil to heat his house. There’s the airport doctor who got rich treating those coronaries and giving physicals to pilots. Kaplan also gives a chilling account of JFK’s biggest crash, the 1975 Eastern Flight 66, which killed 113 people. But the good news, he says, is airplane safety is much improved. So in the end, maybe we should be happy that at JFK planes take off and planes land – and leave it at that.
