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That's how the Kansas City Airport (MCI) was designed. Before 9/11, you could park, go through security, and walk onto a plane in 15 minutes. Very minimal space is given to restaurants, shops, or even bathrooms inside gates.

The layour is 3 separate terminals which are each a semicircle ring: http://www.metafares.com/images/airports/MCI_Airport%20Layou...

It is great to fly in and out of. It feel optimized for people to get on and off planes quickly, and get out of the airport fast.

It is awful to have layovers in or have to change terminals in for a flight: you have to leave security for everything for one. And the waiting spaces are cramped and unfriendly.

After 9/11 it's still extremely fast to get in and out of, but the long waiting before flights is unpleasant. - Personally I would love to see airport design focus on passengers and less on retail space. All the proposals to replace KC Airport brag about all the shopping and restaurants... when all most people care about is spending as little time there as possible.

Security checkpoints were added to airports in the 70s. Airlines actually fought their introduction tooth and nail - it took a huge wave of airliner hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s to sway public opinion and bring the FAA around to the necessity of security screening. The book "The Skies Belong to Us"[1] gives a great account of the events of that era.

The MCI airport had the misfortune to be designed and built almost right before this all happened. TWA designed the terminal according to their vision of the future of air travel - drive right up to the gate, walk a couple steps onto the plane, and away you go. The new security requirement invalidated this vision almost right away, and made the design so unworkable that TWA moved their hub to St. Louis only 10 years after opening their brand new "airport of the future" in Kansas City.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skies_Belong_to_Us [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_International_Airp...

Some thoughts I just had reading these comments: We all accept that boarding a train is a much more pleasant experience than boarding a plane, largely because you don't have this need for massive security waits, arriving three hours early, etc. But... why don't we have those things on trains? I can think of a couple reasons: 1) trains tend to be mostly used for domestic travel (in North America), so you don't have border checks slowing things down, and 2) trains can only go where the tracks go, so although you could certainly carry out an attack on a train, it would be much more difficult to use a train as a weapon against something else, or to try to stage a getaway of some kind by taking a train off course.

Perhaps there's only so much that can be done about #1, but regarding #2, I wonder if we could rethink airport security once we have completely autonomous planes. If the plane is controlled completely by autopilot and/or remotely, it's basically on tracks, so I can't see any logical argument why we couldn't then take the same approach to domestic flights as to domestic trains. (You could argue that that's already the case with locked cockpit doors, but there's an argument on both sides there.)

There are other differences, e.g. one might hope to escape off of a moving train or arrest its progress, both of which are nigh-impossible on a flying object, autonomous or not.

At release, a security area will be required. How secure it is exactly, is definitely up to you. That said, if your security is overly deficient then you may be fined by the regulators/inspectors, not to mention that having an actual incident (not yet implemented) would cause your airport to be viewed less favorably by the airlines & their passengers.

We have definitely had discussions on this exact topic -- potentially allowing absolutely zero security -- and it's something we may revisit in the future. It's a bit of a fine line when it comes to both not being too outrageous on the political-correctness scale, as well as being able to model/simulate the risks in a not-too-overly-rare and still fun way.

Honestly though, these are exactly the kinds of discussions/concepts that we really want the game to allow for! :-)

What if security was done in the parking lot? You'd go through security then board a train that would drop you off inside the airport.

I remember the days as a kid when you could just walk out to the tarmac, climb a stairs and board a plane. Life was so much simpler, then someone hijacked a plane to Cuba and it all suddenly changed virtually overnight.

> That said, if your security is overly deficient then you may be fined by the regulators/inspectors, not to mention that having an actual incident (not yet implemented) would cause your airport to be viewed less favorably by the airlines & their passengers.

The big problem with modeling incidents is going to be that it has very little to do with airport security at all, which is almost all pure theater. For example screening for knives is useless because anyone can make a shiv in an airport bathroom the same way prisoners do. Even explosives are not particularly any more dangerous on a plane than they would be in a subway car or anything like that (in the sense that they can kill 100% of passengers in both cases). Checking for ID only causes the terrorists to choose a person with no priors as the one who carries out the attack.

And attacks are adaptive. Banning twelve ounce bottles when you can have both ten three ounce bottles and an arbitrarily large empty tub is classic theater.

The main reason there haven't been any repeats of 9/11 is that as of 9/11 all passengers are on notice that resisting hijackers is mandatory, and even a terrorist with a knife can't fend off 100 passengers at once.

So much of the security theater also has financial motives. Checking ID prevents the resale of non-refundable tickets. Prohibiting 12 ounce bottles encourages people to buy one inside the airport for five times the grocery store price. Makers of expensive scanning equipment are in favor of mandates or subsidies for expensive scanning equipment.

You could add a lobbying component to the game. If you're an airport you want to defend the profit-generating ID checks against criticism from privacy and immigrant advocates, but oppose mandates for security scanners you have to pay for when their manufacturers lobby for them.

> We have definitely had discussions on this exact topic -- potentially allowing absolutely zero security -- and it's something we may revisit in the future.

One answer might be to let the user choose what country to set up shop in, and then some hypothetical countries might have less security bureaucracy but other disadvantages (like not being able to have direct flights to high bureaucracy countries).

> For example screening for knives is useless because anyone can make a shiv in an airport bathroom the same way prisoners do.

I'd never really thought about shivs before, but I've always felt that the available materials in duty free (after security) must be more than sufficient to blow a hole in the side of a plane (lots of aerosols etc)?

I guess the additional danger comes with a plane lands somewhere and a train has far less potential to cause massive collateral damage. However looking at the tube bombings in London it is clearly possible to make a decent fist of terror using trains.

>The main reason there haven't been any repeats of 9/11 is that as of 9/11 all passengers are on notice that resisting hijackers is mandatory, and even a terrorist with a knife can't fend off 100 passengers at once.

I disagree. The changes to cockpit doors are far far more relevant, it's simply not practical to take control of a plane through threat of violence (plus all pilots are now aware they won't necessarily be hostages - they'll be weapons). Yes a bladed weapon will only let you harm a small number of passengers before being overwhelmed - but a couple of guns probably achieves the same. The clear difference being the chance of depressurising the cabin.

> I'd never really thought about shivs before, but I've always felt that the available materials in duty free (after security) must be more than sufficient to blow a hole in the side of a plane (lots of aerosols etc)?

The reason explosives are only a minor threat to planes isn't that it would be hard to get one through, it's that the threat it poses isn't specific to planes.

> I guess the additional danger comes with a plane lands somewhere and a train has far less potential to cause massive collateral damage.

That isn't much of an attack vector when you can't choose the target. Nearly all of "somewhere" is bodies of water and open space.

> However looking at the tube bombings in London it is clearly possible to make a decent fist of terror using trains.

It's not about trains either. Someone could drive a car bomb into a nightclub.

A lot of the smaller attacks that have actually happened would have been dramatically worse if we hadn't lucked into the fact that the terrorists were incompetent. Although there may be a shared causation in that correlation.

> The changes to cockpit doors are far far more relevant, it's simply not practical to take control of a plane through threat of violence

Those are also a help, though somewhat of a risk too if a terrorist actually managed to get into the cockpit.

> Yes a bladed weapon will only let you harm a small number of passengers before being overwhelmed - but a couple of guns probably achieves the same. The clear difference being the chance of depressurising the cabin.

That changes nothing. Given the choice between certain death or likely death while saving a thousand people on the ground, the decision remains clear.

>That would mean you don't need space for restaurants

Restaurants existed in airports long before 9/11. People arrive early because missing flights costs you hundreds of dollars. Security adds maybe 20 mins to the process.

That just means that people should be able to turn up and get on any flight without pre-booking.

I'm going to guess that pre-booking is some sort of way to maximize revenue or minimize wasted empty seats.

Definitely minimizing wasted empty seats. Additionally, by encouraging people to book far enough ahead, they can change equipment to match the demand or add another flight to that day.

It also allows them to price discriminate against business travelers who tend to have deeper pockets (flights expensed to their company) and tend to make lots of last minute travel changes (need another day to close a deal, etc). Losing the ability to ramp up the price on these types of travelers would mean higher fares for everyone and likely fewer ticket sales.

There's already a frustrating degree of uncertainty as to when (if ever) showing up at the airport will actually yield a seat towards your destination. Adding the uncertainty of other people's demand and even more highly variable waits in line sounds like hell.

I'd much rather cope with the Christmas rush by booking months early than by waiting at the airport for days.

I can at least imagine a system where (a) planes aren't assigned to destinations until the last minute and (b) more planes are made available at the obvious times of the year (holidays and so on). That might yield a very flexible turn-up-and-go system.

However I've never run an airport so I can also imagine that there are important factors that I don't even know about that make this unworkable.

This was how the original Eastern Air shuttle service worked. They ran flights between Washington, DC, Boston, and New York, scheduled to depart every hour on the hour. No reservations, just show up and walk onto the plane and you could pay the fare (roughly $12 in early-1960s dollars) on board. And if the hourly plane filled up and more people were still waiting to board, they'd roll out another plane.

The hourly flights still exist (now run by American, which inherited the service from US Airways in the merger, which bought the service from Donald Trump's creditors after he defaulted on the loans he used to buy the service from Eastern when Eastern got into financial trouble), though of course now you have to buy a ticket before you go through security.

Except where it adds a lot more. It's about 45 minutes at our airport, as we've found out a few times.

Plus, they ask you to be even earlier than that just in case it might take longer, so you're stuck there for 45+ minutes after security.

It's also for the same reason movies start 12 minutes after the announced time: Some people are always a bit late.

Ouch that is awful. Sounds like ORD, that's the only airport I've been to that consistently sucked in TSA lines.

They've gotten a lot better since December.

Also, layovers.