Cockpit Confidential by Patrick Smith

planes in the United States, where you’ll have to stand in three different lines, be photographed and fingerprinted, recheck your bags, and face the TSA gauntlet, when instead you can transfer seamlessly in Frankfurt or Dubai? Indeed, this is part of what has made carriers like Emirates, Singapore Airlines, and others so successful.
3. Complimentary wireless Internet
    What do we do at airports? We kill time. And there are few better and more productive ways of killing time than logging on to the web. Send an email to your mistress; read my blogs at askthepilot.com ; Skype your friend in Slovenia. Many, if not most, major terminals have Wi-Fi access, but it’s often expensive and cumbersome (few things in life are more irritating than those credit card payment pages). It should be everywhere, and it should be free.
4. Convenience stores
    It appears the evolution of airport design will not be complete until the terminal and shopping mall become indistinguishable. I’m okay with Starbucks and souvenir kiosks, but it’s the saturation of high-end boutiques that always confounds me. Apparently there isn’t a traveler alive who isn’t in dying need of a hundred-dollar Mont Blanc pen, a remote-control helicopter, or a thousand-dollar massage chair. And what’s with all the luggage stores? Who on earth buys a suitcase after they get to the airport? What we really need are the same sorts of things we buy at CVS or the corner convenience store: basic groceries and dry goods, stationery, and personal care items. Brussels and Amsterdam are two places that do this right, with in-terminal food marts and pharmacies.
5. Power ports
    I didn’t realize that passengers have a right—nay, a duty—to mooch free electricity from their carrier of choice, but at this point it’s a lost cause to argue. Airlines should throw in the towel and build more charging stations.
6. Showers and a short-stay hotel
    No serious international terminal should be without a place to wash up or crash for a few hours. Passengers arriving from overseas can shower and change before their next connection. Those with longer waits can grab a nap in one of those pay-by-the-hour sleeping pods.
7. Play areas for children
    Truth be told, airport play areas encourage toddlers to shriek and yell even more than they already do, but at least they’re doing it in a localized area that’s easy for the rest of us to avoid. Ideally, this spot should be in a soundproofed bubble six miles from the airport, but a space at the far end of the concourse is a reasonable alternative. The Delta terminal in Boston has a pretty cool kidport, but nothing tops the “Kids’ Forest” at Amsterdam-Schiphol. I’d play there myself if nobody was watching.
8. Better dining options (i.e., fewer chain restaurants)
    Chick-fil-A, Burger King, Sbarro. Airport cuisine isn’t a whole lot different from the shopping mall food court. We need more independent restaurants serving actual food, ideally with a local bent.
    The next time you’re at LaGuardia, check out Rocco Manniello’s Yankee Clipper restaurant over at the Marine Air Terminal. That’s the circular building with the art deco doors and flying fish relief along its rooftop, adjacent to the Delta Shuttle. Rocco’s is a cafeteria-style place on the left-hand side of the rotunda. It’s good greasy spoon food with absolutely no corporate affiliation. (If Anthony Bourdain ever does a segment on airport food, Rocco’s should be his first stop.) The Marine Air Terminal was the launching point of the first-ever transatlantic and around-the-world flights, and the restaurant’s walls are decorated with historic photographs. You can eat in or take your sandwich out to one of the wooden benches beneath the famous James Brooks Flight mural. Commissioned in 1952, Brooks’s painting traces the history of aviation from mythical to (then) modern, Icarus to Pan Am