[cscharenberg]

That's how the Kansas City Airport (MCI) was designed. Before 9/11, you could park, go through security, and walk onto a plane in 15 minutes. Very minimal space is given to restaurants, shops, or even bathrooms inside gates.

The layour is 3 separate terminals which are each a semicircle ring: http://www.metafares.com/images/airports/MCI_Airport%20Layou...

It is great to fly in and out of. It feel optimized for people to get on and off planes quickly, and get out of the airport fast.

It is awful to have layovers in or have to change terminals in for a flight: you have to leave security for everything for one. And the waiting spaces are cramped and unfriendly.

After 9/11 it's still extremely fast to get in and out of, but the long waiting before flights is unpleasant. - Personally I would love to see airport design focus on passengers and less on retail space. All the proposals to replace KC Airport brag about all the shopping and restaurants... when all most people care about is spending as little time there as possible.

[alexhutcheson]

Security checkpoints were added to airports in the 70s. Airlines actually fought their introduction tooth and nail - it took a huge wave of airliner hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s to sway public opinion and bring the FAA around to the necessity of security screening. The book "The Skies Belong to Us"[1] gives a great account of the events of that era.

The MCI airport had the misfortune to be designed and built almost right before this all happened. TWA designed the terminal according to their vision of the future of air travel - drive right up to the gate, walk a couple steps onto the plane, and away you go. The new security requirement invalidated this vision almost right away, and made the design so unworkable that TWA moved their hub to St. Louis only 10 years after opening their brand new "airport of the future" in Kansas City.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skies_Belong_to_Us [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_International_Airp...

[tempestn]

Some thoughts I just had reading these comments: We all accept that boarding a train is a much more pleasant experience than boarding a plane, largely because you don't have this need for massive security waits, arriving three hours early, etc. But... why don't we have those things on trains? I can think of a couple reasons: 1) trains tend to be mostly used for domestic travel (in North America), so you don't have border checks slowing things down, and 2) trains can only go where the tracks go, so although you could certainly carry out an attack on a train, it would be much more difficult to use a train as a weapon against something else, or to try to stage a getaway of some kind by taking a train off course.

Perhaps there's only so much that can be done about #1, but regarding #2, I wonder if we could rethink airport security once we have completely autonomous planes. If the plane is controlled completely by autopilot and/or remotely, it's basically on tracks, so I can't see any logical argument why we couldn't then take the same approach to domestic flights as to domestic trains. (You could argue that that's already the case with locked cockpit doors, but there's an argument on both sides there.)