INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL

Travel articles
Airlines Using Technology in a Push for Shorter Lines
By DAVID LEONHARDT, N.Y. Times News Service
A traveler prints a boarding pass from her office computer, drives to the airport and then walks straight past the snaking line at the main counter. She drops her bags on a conveyer belt and dashes to the gate, where the bar code on her boarding pass causes her photograph to appear on the gate agent's computer screen. Her entire time in the airport, from curb to gate: less than 10 minutes.
At the moment, this scenario is little more than a dream for all but a few, elite passengers. Airports are more crowded than ever, and lines are sharply longer than they were even a few years ago.
But in a competition to attract the business travelers responsible for much of the carriers' revenue, airlines are spending tens of millions of dollars on new technology. They hope to whisk passengers through terminals more quickly, redefining what industry executives glumly call "the airport experience."
By the end of the year, Continental Airlines plans to have 300 A.T.M.-like computers across the country that allow people to print their own boarding passes and baggage tags.
Delta Air Lines has spent $750 million over the last two years wiring airports and preparing to introduce similar gadgets. Northwest Airlines responds to canceled flights at its hubs by rolling out banks of wireless phones with direct connections to its reservations desk.
And Alaska Airlines, the most aggressive in using technology recently, has begun to allow people with electronic tickets to print boarding passes from home or office computers. As part of a pilot program, it has also scanned the driver's licenses of about 500 frequent fliers into its computer system. The bar code on the boarding pass retrieves both their driver's license and a larger photo so travelers never have to reach into their wallets before boarding the plane.
For now, business travelers are the main beneficiaries of the improvements. Some of the initiatives, such as calling passengers' cell phones to tell them about a late flight, are available only to the top tier of frequent fliers, and others, like the kiosks, appeal mainly to travelers who do not check bags.
Continental has even installed a kiosk in the lobby of AT&T's headquarters in New Jersey so travelers there can get a boarding pass before they arrive at the airport. And Northwest is testing a program that allows employees of 10 midwestern companies to print their own passes off the airline's Web site.
But unlike some other recent perks for corporate road warriors--like expanded first-class sections or the installation of double beds on overnight flights--much of the new technology will eventually be available for all passengers to use, industry experts said.
"Airports weren't designed for the volumes they're now getting," said Michael L. Zea, a vice president in Mercer Management Consulting's airline practice. "There's a lot of strain on the system, and technology can be very helpful in easing that."
Of course, automated systems are not always reliable. During a threatened strike by U S Airways employees in March, passengers holding electronic tickets needed old-fashioned paper tickets to have any hope of getting a seat on another carrier. And if the airlines eventually replace agents with the machines, they could both anger their unions and force passengers to do more work to board a plane, travel experts said.
But after a year in which consumer complaints more than doubled from their 1998 level, industry executives say that shortening the lines at their airport counters is a sure-fire way to boost their carrier's images.
As air travel has surged during the long economic expansion and both the size of airports and airline staffs have failed to keep up, the average amount of time that travelers spend in line at the main counter has reached 16 minutes, up 20 percent from three years ago, according to Airport Interviewing and Research, a White Plains company that surveys passengers. The stricter security standards that the government has adopted in recent years have added to the lines, as well.
As a result, no matter what travelers think of folding themselves into a middle seat or drinking the airlines' mediocre coffee, they will generally be happy if their trips take less time than they have come to expect, airline executives say. "You can make up for a lot of coffee sins by having a line that's been reduced," said Dirk C. McMahon, the senior vice president for ground operations at Northwest Airlines. And, at $10,000 apiece, the machines cost much less than additional employees.

Do you tap your fingers as you wait for the microwave to zap your instant coffee? Do you eat lunch on the go? Do you answer the phone while reading your e-mails, and answer your e-mails while watching television? Then according to James Gleick, the author of Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, you are probably suffering from "Hurry Sickness," the disease which, he says, defines our decade.

"Our computers, our movies, our sex lives--they all run faster now than ever before," Gleick says. "And the more we fill our lives with time-saving devices and time-saving strategies, the more rushed we feel."

How can this be? How can we feel hassled in the kitchen when we have a dishwasher to take the strain? How can we feel impatient when we can e-mail information in less time than it takes to lick a stamp? It is these contradictions that Gleick, a science writer for The New York Times and author of the bestselling Chaos, set out to explore.

"I'm a multi-tasker. I'm the guy standing in front of the microwave wondering what I can get accomplished in 90 seconds," he says guiltily. "Have you noticed that television is becoming a multi-tasking activity, like radio? We are no longer satisfied just watching TV, we've got to be watching with a remote control in our hand. It's on but we're also at the computer." Which leads us to the next question that Gleick has been busily worrying over. Technology has speeded up our lives, but are we equipped to cope with the pace?

"One answer is no, obviously we are not equipped to deal with such an increase in pace," Gleick says. "There are all sorts of diseases we seem to have as a result of this rushing around. I talk about Hurry Sickness but you could say we are collectively manic."

He recounts an anecdote about George Washington who was said, in retirement on his plantation, to be so desperate for company that he would send slaves to wait by the roadside and hail passersby to invite them in for dinner. These days our complaint is the opposite, of course. We have too much contact and too much stuff. We pack our pockets with beepers and cell phones and Palm Pilots--the latest model can summon the Internet as you walk down the street--and complain of "information overload."

"We can barely understand," Gleick says, "that the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor ended an 11-day voyage by the unseen, unheard Japanese fleet through a data vacuum; or that 2,000 people died in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans a fortnight after a peace treaty was signed in London. We expect information to shine everywhere, soonest."

But those expectations have also left us feeling exhausted, harried and under pressure as the faxes and e-mails roll in, creating a bogus sense of urgency. The medical profession talks of "bleeper medicine," where some doctors say that they are seeing an addiction to paging and quick fixes.

Far from being liberated by time-saving devices, we become even more impatient--another symptom of Hurry Sickness. "I admit it feels slow to me now to print on a laser printer which does six pages a minute," he says, shaking his head. "Yet I used to feed the pages in by hand. It might have taken all day but it was a miracle that I could do it--I was saving weeks.

"This feeling of impatience we get, grabbing at one piece of information after another, well, we're doing this faster than we would have dreamt possible even ten years ago. But if we stopped to think about it, we would realize we feel irritable with how slow things are."

As a result, we have changed our expectations of what is possible, what is normal and what is fun. "Look at One-Minute Bedtime Stories," he adds sadly. "It's hard to imagine anyone boasting to friends, 'Hey, I've got this wonderful one-minute book for my kids!' Yet there is an entire series of these books and they sell. It's hard to think what the extra ten minutes saved by not reading a longer bedtime story could be used for. But people are confused about what they should be spending time on.

"Most of us like living in a buzz," he says. "We complain but we aren't shutting down our e-mail addresses. We like connectedness. We're not interested in an about-face towards simpler lives.

"Have you ever watched a TV commercial with cowboys? It's part of the American psyche that there is nothing finer than to be a cowboy alone on the range, sleeping under the stars. But look at the people who are actually doing that. They can't wait to get back to a city. Even though we all feel we don't have enough time for contemplation, for just being alone with our thoughts, when push comes to shove, we're really not that anxious to be alone with our thoughts."

By Justin Hyde, Associated Press; Christine Tierney, Reuters

As our celestial odometer hits 2000 and the average American driver racks up 14,000 miles this year, it's hard to imagine a tool that's changed us more in this century than the automobile.

Turn the calendar back to the turn of the last century, and in New York, for example, you'll find 15,000 horses dying in the streets annually from exhaustion, beating or accidents. Dust from a million pounds of manure produced every day kept windows closed even in the hottest months. As for the clatter of iron wheels and horseshoes against paving stones--Edgar Allan Poe called it the best "contrivance for driving men mad through sheer noise."

Matters were not much better in rural areas. There, the world was a circle with a narrow radius, based on the distance a horse could travel in a day. Twenty miles over average roads could easily be a four-hour ride in a horse-drawn carriage. Trains were an extravagance.

The first, primitive cars were built in the late 1800s. By 1900, some 300 companies were trying to build automobiles in the United States, but only about 4,000 autos had actually been sold.

While cars were growing in popularity, they were still outnumbered by horses, still prone to breakdowns, still the target of booby traps from farmers upset with the noisy contraptions bringing trespassing city folk to their land.

It would take a different kind of automobile--and automaker--to remake our landscape. Henry Ford built his first car in 1896. Ten years later, the Ford Motor Co. would be cranking out more than 10,000 cars a year from its plant in Detroit. In 1923, his annual Model T production topped out at 1.8 million. Altogether, Ford would eventually build 15 million.

Still, it wasn't until 1914 that more cars were produced than horse-drawn carriages or wagons.

Today cars are everywhere. There are an estimated 215 million in the United States. Nearly 60 percent of American homes have at least two cars; 19 percent have three or more. The typical household will spend about $6,000 a year on automotive expenses--vehicles, gas, insurance. The average American driver logs 39 miles a day. All those drivers can choose from 3.9 million miles of road, stopping at any of about 187,000 gas stations, 94,200 convenience stores or 186,000 fast-food restaurants.

But watch the road. By 2020, traffic-related crashes are expected to become the world's third-leading cause of sickness and death, according to a report by Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater.

According to the report, crash-induced illnesses and deaths will rise from ninth place in 1990 to third place in 2020. Slater said 42,000 Americans die annually in traffic-related deaths, and nearly a half-million people die worldwide each year from such crashes.

By 2025–2030, the number of cars on the road could double to one billion from 500 million currently and 50 million in the 1950s, according to some forecasts.

By David Foster, Associated Press; Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post

Wilbur and Orville Wright would have laughed at the sight. The Boeing 747 squats on the factory floor, a fat-bellied, hump-backed behemoth weighing 400 tons.

This beast? Fly? Not a chance, the Wright brothers could have told you.

The Wrights' historic first flight in December 1903 covered all of 120 feet. Had they launched their aircraft at the back of the Boeing 747's economy section, they wouldn't have made it to first class. But they got far enough. What the Wright brothers began on the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., transformed the world.

Aircraft changed the way wars are fought. They shrank the world so that now, there's almost no place on Earth that can't be reached in less than a day from any other place. Flight paved the way for the space program and an escape from the planet.

Airplanes not only lifted people and packages, says Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. They also carried our imagination aloft. "Before 1903, you heard, 'If God had meant for us to fly, He would have given us wings.' After 1903, people said, 'If humans can build a machine to take us into the air, what can't we do?"

America's involvement in World War II began and ended with the airplane. In December 1941, Japanese warplanes attacking Pearl Harbor shook the United States out of its isolationism. Four years later, a Boeing B-29 SuperFortress called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In between, the United States produced nearly 300,000 military aircraft, including the first practical helicopters.

After the war, jet and rocket engines took aircraft faster, farther and higher. Test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first man to travel faster than sound, hitting nearly 700 mph in a rocket-powered Bell X-1 during a flight in October 1947.

In the 1960s, the X-15 rocket-propelled plane flew higher and faster than any other airplane. It hit 4,520 mph and soared high enough to earn its pilots astronaut's wings. By then, however, the greatest glory in the skies was going to the space program.

But aircraft have continued to progress. The Boeing 747, the world's largest commercial jetliner, is a prime example. It can carry more than 400 passengers and fly them 8,300 miles without refueling. More than 1,230 of the jumbo jets have been made since 1969, and they have carried 2.2 billion passengers.

Thirty years later, the enormous plane still impresses. The Boeing Co. assembles the jetliners in a factory that the company claims is the world's largest building--98 acres under one roof. It needs the space. A 747 has 6 million parts, 171 miles of wiring and five miles of tubing. It contains 147,000 pounds of aluminum and has a tail that reaches 63 feet high, the equivalent of a six-story building.

What's the latest in aeronautical technology? Only a few privileged people know, aerospace writer Bill Sweetman says. Many observers believe a supersonic aircraft known as Aurora is being tested at the U.S. government's top-secret Area 51 in Nevada.

But it doesn't take secrets to impress. Sweetman advises simply looking skyward, wherever you happen to be. "I think what would most amaze somebody from 1903, if they were around today, would be that there are so many airplanes," he says. "They're as routine as trains were in the 19th century. They're flying everywhere."

Oceans are puddles to be jumped. Mountains are speed bumps. Just about the only place without regularly scheduled jetliner service is Antarctica, in winter.

Go down to the local Safeway and notice the fresh crab meat from Thailand. Go to www.horse-ex.com and you can order up a thoroughbred from New Zealand. Your pretty, unwilted flowers may have started to bloom in South America. Call an 800 number and you can have a genuine New York City pizza delivered anywhere in the world. You can send a package in the afternoon from Japan and it will arrive the next morning in Washington. Federal Express has a fleet of 600 planes delivering to 210 countries.

The planet is 24,901 miles in circumference--a number that simply isn't very impressive anymore. Earth is now sort of … cute.

(AP) The twentieth century. It started with horses and hours. It ends with Maseratis and microseconds, with cars speeding across highways, airplanes streaking across skies, microprocessors burning across desktops and space shuttles circling the earth. This century's mad dash of innovation has produced all of these things--and the most frantic human era ever.

We phone. We fax. We page. We e-mail. We race from one end of life to the other, rarely glancing over our shoulders. Technology, mass media and a desire to do more, do it better and do it yesterday have turned us into a world of hurriers.

Stop and smell the roses? No more. Instead, a world of seven-day diets and 24-hour news channels and one-hour photo processing and 30-minute pizza delivery and 10-minute facials and two-minute warnings and Minute Rice.

Fast food. Fast computers. Fast cars in fast lanes. VCRs with five fast-forward settings. Sound bites and the rat race and instant coffee.

Get rich quick. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. Run on empty. Just do it.

About this time a century ago, America was still a rural nation. Meals could take entire afternoons to prepare; trips into town ate up whole days.

Yet people were already openmouthed at life's fast pace. A man named Simon Newcombe looked back at the 19th century and observed: "A beggar today riding in a boxcar can travel faster than a king could 100 years ago."

Then, everything accelerated. The innovations in transportation alone boggle the mind:

--1903: the first speed limit (England, 20 mph).

--1908: the Ford Model T, top speed 45 mph.

--1911: the world's earliest air-mail delivery (in India).

--1933: the Boeing 247 (600 miles in four hours).

--1947: Test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier (700 mph).

--1969: Apollo 10's three astronauts become the fastest humans ever (24,791 mph).

"No century has been like this. And we're only speeding up," says David Grubin, producer of the recent PBS documentary "America 1900."

Milestones from a hurried century (pared down, of course, to keep this quick):

--In 1968, in an allegorical episode of the original "Star Trek," Captain Kirk encounters a species whose existence is far faster-paced than humans. But there is a price. "At this level, they are easily damaged," Kirk says, "as if accelerated living burns them out."

--In Japan, the modern era has coined two new words: "karoshi" and "karojisatsu"--death from overwork and suicide from overwork.

--And right now, labs in New Mexico, California and New York are competing to build the fastest computer ever--one that performs more than 1 trillion calculations per second. That's equivalent to every person on Earth doing 200 sums on a pocket calculator. All in that same second.

We're busy beings, we 20th century humans. Places to go, people to meet, planners to fill, files to download, bills to pay, planes to catch, frozen dinners to nuke, Web sites to surf, kids to pick up, stress to manage, thromboses to have, speeding tickets to pay. Gotta move on.

Twentieth century's about over, folks. Hurry along, now.

(Reuters) Saying the world was moving so fast that people no longer stopped to ask the meaning of life, Pope John Paul warned that humanity risked losing its soul to the technology it has come to worship.

The Pope posed the challenge in his latest encyclical, "Fides et Ratio" (Faith and Reason), a thought-provoking 150-page philosophical tour-de-force on the human condition.

The encyclical, the latest in a series of papal letters addressing important matters, said humanity has to accept certain truths rather than embrace ethical relativism where quick success is rewarded and the search for ultimate truth is shunned as archaic.

"Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?" the Pope wrote. Today, humanity often found itself sucked into what he called "a maelstrom of data and facts" which left many people "wondering whether it still makes sense to ask about meaning."

Seeking meaning has become "all the more necessary today because the immense expansion of humanity's technical capability demands a renewed and sharpened sense of ultimate values."

"If this technology is not ordered to something greater than a merely utilitarian end, then it could soon prove inhuman and even become a potential destroyer of the human race."

Saying the Word of God could provide people with a "unifying explanation of all that they do in the world," the Pope urged them to stop to listen to the sounds of silence and contemplate the wonders of creation.

By John Berrio, courtesy of Ann Landers

Agony claws at my heart. I am a statistic. When I first got here, I felt very much alone. I was overwhelmed by grief, and I expected to find sympathy.

I found no sympathy. I saw only thousands of others whose bodies were as badly mangled as mine. I was given a number and placed in a category. The category was called "Traffic Fatalities."

It doesn't matter how the accident happened. I was goofing off--going too fast, taking crazy chances. But I was enjoying my freedom and having fun. The last thing I remember was passing an old lady who seemed to be going awfully slow. I heard a crash and felt a terrific jolt.

Suddenly, I awakened. It was very quiet. A police officer was standing over me. I saw a doctor. My body was mangled. I was saturated with blood. Pieces of jagged glass were sticking out all over. Strange that I couldn't feel anything.

Hey, don't pull that sheet over my head. I can't be dead. I'm only 17. I've got a date tonight. I'm supposed to have a wonderful life ahead of me.

My folks came to identify me. Why did they have to see me like this? Why did I have to look at Mom's eyes when she faced the most terrible ordeal of her life? David suddenly looked very old. He told the man in charge, "Yes, he's our son."

The funeral was weird. I saw all of my relatives and friends walk toward the casket. They looked at me with the saddest eyes I've ever seen.

Please, somebody--wake me up! Get me out of here. I can't bear to see Mom and David in such pain.

My brother and sister are like zombies. They move like robots. In a daze. Everybody. No one can believe this. I can't believe it either.

Please, don't bury me! I'm not dead! I have a lot of living to do! I want to laugh and run again. I want to sing and dance. Please don't put me in the ground! I promise if you give me just one more chance, God, I'll be the most careful driver in the whole world. Please, God, I'm only 17.