Imagine a time when you could pull up to the airport 20 minutes before a departing flight and know that you—and your bag—had a good chance of making the flight. This isn't a joke: In the late 1980s, domestic airline passengers could cut it that close without losing their sanity. And while the most dramatic changes in the way we experience airports wouldn’t come until after 9/11—and even though the airline deregulation act of 1978 brought more people into the skies in the 1980s—a trip to the airport wasn’t the intimidating, stress-inducing drill it is today.
Here are some the ways airports were different back in 1987:
Airport security was a breeze—relatively speaking.
The airline industry, with oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration, had control over security until late 2001. This may seem startling today, but there was a certain logic to it, considering it was their planes and passengers that were most at risk. U.S. carriers contracted out this chore to private companies, who employed minimum-wage, and minimally-trained, screeners; travelers rarely encountered long lines, as the whole process involved a brief pass through a metal detector, shoes and jacket on, and quick scan of hand luggage by an X-ray machine. Hijackings were the main threat to aviation at the time, and it wasn’t until after the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103 in late 1988 that airports began tighter screening of checked bags, ultimately requiring that airlines ensure passengers were actually traveling on the same flight as their belongings.
Even getting to the airport was a more relaxed affair. “I used to drive to the airport and park just steps from the entry door,” says Joe Brancatelli, who runs joesentme.com, a website for road warriors. “You could drop off someone and pick up or wait for them without fear that you'll be run off the grounds for security reasons.”
Friends and family could come and see you off at the gate.
Since security was such a non-event, travelers were able to roam freely all over the airport, and family and friends could accompany departing passengers all the way up to the boarding gate. Non-travelers could also wait at the gate area for an arriving passenger. These entourages were welcomed by the airports—those bar and food tabs they ran up, especially when flights were delayed—were an important source of revenue, one that was sorely missed after 9/11, when non-travelers were banned from the secure side of the airport.
(But if you got to the airport too early, you'd probably be bored.)
In 1987, airport concourses weren’t glitzy shopping malls with award-winning food options like many are today—instead, most were quite utilitarian. “It was more like taking the bus,” says Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research. “With a few exceptions, most airport restaurants and snack bars were horrible and expensive. There were few, if any, ‘designer boutiques,' and even duty-free stores were fairly rudimentary.”
And airport interiors, fittingly, seemed more inspired by a highway rest stop than the glamour of the jet age. “They were browner and more generic,” says Brancatelli. “Earth tones were big then, and most of the concessions were these generic bars and restaurants that all had this brown signage.”
After all, if most passengers were just there for mere minutes, it didn’t have to look like a luxury resort.
That all-important metric the industry raptly follows today—the “dwell time” between clearing security and boarding the plane—wasn’t even on the radar then. Today’s passengers spent an average 60 minutes hanging out beyond the checkpoint, but back then, says Harteveldt, no one paid attention.
“All the better things about airports today—clubs, food, amenities—are because they have to do this to keep us from rioting with all the hours of ‘dwell’ time,” Brancatelli adds.
But hey, you could always smoke.
Most airports allowed smoking, since bans on in-flight smoking didn’t start to kick in until the late 1980s, and besides, airport smoking was subject to local or state regulations, not federal rules. (Some large hub airports still do permit smoking, although in specified smoking rooms.) But change has come gradually: According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control , 22 of the 29 largest airports in the U.S. were completely smoke-free by 2010, compared with just 13 in 2002.
Without technology, there was more personal service.
Self-service kiosks hadn’t arrived—except for a very few shuttle-like operations—and the smartphone era was way off the in future, so service was primarily delivered by human beings. Airlines employed more people in customer service jobs at airports 30 years ago to deal with everything from checking in fliers to luggage handling.
“There was definitely a lot more personal interaction with the airlines back then,” says airline analyst Michael Derchin, a former executive with Pan Am and American. But there was a downside, too, says Bakari Brock, who travels frequently in his role as senior director of U.S. operations at Lyft. While we take Wi-Fi and cell technology for granted now, “imagine arriving after a long flight, exhausted, and trying to find your ride and where to meet them." Often, lines for taxis at airports surpassed anything that was inside the terminal—ditto for pay phones that actually worked.
And while the airlines had more of a human presence at airports, it was definitely put to the test in 1987, which was also a year of epic delays and disruptions, in the aftermath of a wave of airline mega-mergers—among the biggest was an overnight mashup of Continental Airlines, People Express, and Texas International, nicknamed the “big bang” by airline insiders. Thousands of passengers lost bags and camped out at airports for days amid the confusion; at one major hub, Minneapolis, the newly merged Northwest and Republic airlines even had to take over an entire hotel to house stranded passengers.
You had your pick of airlines.
There were far more airlines serving far fewer passengers in the 1980s: According to the DOT’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 421 million people flew in the U.S. in 1987, versus just over 700 million in 2016. And there were at least ten major airlines still in business—including some storied brands like Pan Am, Eastern and TWA; today, four big airlines control more than 80 percent of U.S. airline traffic.