Jet-Age Airports

Los Angeles' International Airport resembles a surrealist skid row, composed of a group of crumbling temporary buildings painted in sick and faded shades of pink and green. Gum wrappers and blobs of melting ice cream litter the floors; jammed in the corridors are scales, fortunetelling machines, knickknack shops, gum dispensers, rusty refuse baskets, and hundreds of blinking neon lights. To get to and from their planes, passengers must walk nearly a quarter of a mile. This week Los Angeles' embarrassment over this disgrace came to an end as Vice President Lyndon Johnson dedicated the city's new $70 million jet-age terminal.

Like New York's Idlewild, the new airport is decentralized, with seven individual terminals for the air carriers. Each oval-shaped terminal has a check-in building connected to identically designed satellite buildings with lounges and restaurants. Each satellite will have ten gates with telescopic loading platforms; from car to plane, passengers will only have to walk 600 ft. and all the satellites will be linked by cable cars. In the center of the complex will be the airport's most dramatic structure: two 135-ft.-high parabolic arches suspending a restaurant with a 360DEG view, 70 ft. above ground.

Tested last week at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., which opens for business next year, was a mobile lounge, an innovation credited to Eero Saarinen that should make plane waiting a bit more pleasant. After checking in at the ticket counter, the passenger goes to the proper loading gate, which is really the wide doorway into the lounge. The lounge (54 ft. long, 17 1/2 ft. high and 16 ft. wide) has comfortable chairs, tinted windows, piped-in music and air conditioning. At take-off time, it is driven to the waiting plane parked on the runway. The lounge ramp is fitted to the door of the plane, and the passengers move right to their aircraft seats.

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