No Way Out, No Way Back

WHAT will it be like, at the finish?

In Weekend, French Film Maker Jean-Luc Godard foresees the end of the world as an immense traffic jam. Stanley Kubrick sees the men of 2001 as murder victims of a machine they have made more clever than themselves.

Or consider this scenario: The people are thrown together against their wills, trapped in colossal, modernistic buildings on a landscape devoid of trees. The lights are always lit. Pavement stretches everywhere. Cars and buses and trains and aircraft are useless; there is no way out. No darkness. No silence. No beds. No escape from an endless series of broadcast announcements, no avoiding the silly, circular games of other people's children. There are queues for food, queues for asking questions, queues for liquor--and finally queues for nothing, because there is nothing left. Then there is only boredom, and the debris of boredom. Dirty glasses, old newspapers, crumpled cigarette packs. Even the people are debris. Women wander aimlessly, their hair frazzled, their makeup so streaked that their faces look as if they are melting. Men in rumpled suits, with three days' growth of beard, slump in chairs staring at the message boards that bear no messages.

Packaged and Shipped. Perhaps it will all begin with a simple and foreseeable act of God--say a heavy snowstorm in New York City. There, last week, at the world's largest international airport, the scenario came true. Even at its best, an airport terminal seems inhuman--a monstrous machine disguised as a building and designed to process people and baggage. To the machine, there is no difference between men, women, children, suitcases, pets. All are collected, screened according to route, classified by status, divided into units of the right size, packaged in aircraft--and shipped. When 17 inches of drifting snow clogged the runways and access roads of John F. Kennedy airport, 6,000 people were forced to exist inside nine broken machines. And, because of the incredible slowness of Mayor John Lindsay's snow-removal machinery, they were prisoners there for three days.

For Michael Rogers, a student headed back to Georgia's Oglethorpe College, the ordeal began shortly after 10 a.m. Sunday, when he telephoned Eastern Airlines to check on its 11:25 a.m. flight to Atlanta. Assured that the flight would depart with "a slight delay despite the snow," Michael drove to the airport and checked into the Eastern terminal at 11 a.m.--only to discover that the flight had been canceled. He was still there 56 hours later. Thousands of other travelers were similarly misled by the airlines, which, out of either optimism or greed, led them to believe that planes were still taking off. American Airlines waited until 2 p.m. on Sunday to announce the indefinite cancellation of all future flights, although all outgoing planes had officially been grounded since 10 a.m. Eastern waited until 9:30 p.m. Sunday to announce that no flight would leave until at least noon of the next day.

Crash Pad. Passengers kept pouring into all the major terminals, only to find that the snow had left no way out and no way back. Three people never even made it to a terminal; they were found in their car in Parking Lot No. 4, dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning. As the snow kept falling and drifting, it gradually dawned on everyone in the terminals that they were completely stranded. Airline officials struggled to provide minimal creature comforts. That is, some struggled. Trans World Airlines turned out 11,500 meals and 18,500 snacks in two days. TWA's clamshell terminal building, designed by the late Eero Saarinen, proved more adequate than most as a crash pad; the decorative red carpets in its gateway tunnels made comfortable mattresses for weary refugees. The airline also converted one of its planes into a movie theater, showing three films continuously from 10 a.m. to midnight on Monday to 142 passengers at a time.

At the Pan American building, where there are no carpets, passengers stretched out wherever they could--behind ticket counters, on luggage carts, even on the huge steel turntables in the baggage area. "Everybody is taking advantage of us," complained Frank Russomanno, a salesman from San Francisco. "The cafeteria is overcharging. The airline is not considering the people--especially the children. There are 1,000 children here, and they haven't done anything for them. They should have organized games. Or something."

Eastern Airlines had only 500 blankets for 1,500 people; when a father managed to get hold of four--one for each of his children--an Eastern official demanded them back for his agents' use (the father refused). A few passengers found their way to the employees' cafeteria in the basement, and stole food. As they crossed the terminal with loaded trays, they became an increasing source of frustration to 500 others who stood in line for five hours one night, only to be finally turned away. The restaurant manager blamed the foul-up on passengers who refused to give up their seats inside, even when they had finished eating. "Some stayed for three days," he said. "They did their laundry and hung it on chairs. They refused to go." Go where?

More Chaos. A few passengers did have enough pull--or gall--to escape. One with pull was Chris Craft Chairman Herbert J. Siegel, who was stranded at the Eastern terminal while awaiting a flight to Acapulco. Siegel called Manhattan Publicist Tex McCrary, who in turn phoned Pro Football Commissioner Pete Rozelle. They managed to commandeer a helicopter that was originally chartered to CBS-TV news. It took McCrary half an hour to locate Siegel after the helicopter landed on the Eastern runway; by the time they got back to the 'copter, three strangers--with gall--were placidly settled in its seats. They refused to get off, so the pilot had to fly them to Manhattan and return for Siegel three hours later.

Not until almost 10 a.m. Tuesday did planes again fly out of Kennedy. By then, though, an airport access road had been plowed--creating even more chaos: in poured a stream of new travelers with reservations on Tuesday flights, who demanded that their tickets be honored. Airline agents explained that they would have to wait until stranded passengers had been cleared out--perhaps another 24 hours. Whereupon they clumped angrily out of the terminals, hailed cabs to return home, and encountered yet one more annoyance. Never noted for their resistance to temptation, taxi drivers were flagrantly gouging passengers, carrying six to a cab and charging $20 a head for the ride into Manhattan--a total of $120, or about $113 over the legal metered fare. Quite a price to pay to get from one Godard traffic jam to another.

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