Word: airports
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When operations manager Spiros Stefanou learns that a flight coming into Athens International Airport is due in early, he picks up his mobile phone and alerts baggage handlers to scramble a crew quickly. Nothing unusual about that - except that the Cisco-supplied handset that Stefanou and some 100 other airport employees use never touches a mobile network. Instead, it wirelessly taps into the airport's internal network, which transmits the call for free anywhere in the 16-sq-km airport. "It bypasses any mobile or telecom network,'' says Fotis Karonis, the airport's director of information technology and telecommunications...
...ushered in the dawn of mass jet travel - and the country has many dilapidated airports to show for it. The good news is that passengers tired of dank, aging facilities can now look forward to more comfortable journeys, with the fruits of a late 1990s terminal-building boom finally being realized. A slew of ultra-modern facilities has been unveiled in 10 American cities, including Seattle, Miami, Detroit, New York City and Los Angeles. The latest and swankiest is Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport's $1.4 billion Terminal D: a sprawling, 185,801-sq-m structure that brings...
...scene on the ground is worse. We land on a patch of dry ground at New Orleans Lakefront Airport. For days, rescue teams like this one have been doggedly shuttling survivors from the putrid streets of the city to this desolate airstrip. Hundreds and hundreds of refugees plucked from parking garages, apartment buildings, highway overpasses, the roofs of their homes, whatever high ground they could find, are now stuck standing on the dark runway, waiting for someone to take them somewhere, anywhere but here...
...handful of airport firefighters who had weathered Katrina in nearby hangers are trying to care for the throngs of dehydrated refugees coming in to what had become an impromptu staging area, radioing out for water and helicopters to get these folks to better-equipped triage areas - like New Orleans International Airport where tents and medicine were available and busses could deliver them to shelters in Texas and northern Louisiana. Large, twin-blade Chinook helicopters had been able to ferry about 400 off the strip. But more people just kept coming and coming, more than can be accommodated with...
...Earlier in the day, fights had broken out for seats on outbound helicopters. "The gang-bangers," said Jimmy Dennis, 34, a Lakefront Airport firefighter who had been up for two nights trying to care for the sick and keep order, "couldn't understand that we had to get the sick people out first." Frightened, the small band of firefighters called in ten New Orleans levee police with shotguns and semi-automatic weapons to calm the crowd. But once the situation was diffused, half the cops had to respond to other calls...