With the current rigorous security measures that are now being employed at airports, travelers are now finding more time on their hands while waiting to board their flight. Whether you are traveling with children or flying on your own, it has become necessary to alleviate the boredom of waiting to board the flight. Fortunately, there are a number of amusing things you can do to kill time at an airport.
Have a Meal: Relaxing while having a snack or a meal is a great way to kill time while waiting for a flight. Airports now have a wide range of food establishments with comfortable seating where people can sit, chat, and enjoy good food. Many airlines no longer offer in-flight meals so having a meal at a national food chain is a great way to have a meal that you know you will like.
You do not have to worry about receiving bad tasting food from an unfamiliar dining establishment. If you want to know what food establishments are at the airport, you can check the airport’s website for more information.
Surf the Internet: Most airports now offer Wi-Fi Internet access. All that you have to do is enable your laptop to connect to the airport’s access point. You can often find a comfortable spot to surf in an airport coffee shop, lounge, or an airline club. The signals are strong and can reach distances of around 95 meters or more. You can also often pick up the signal at the entrance of the airport and the signals are not disrupted by windows, walls, and doors. The three main Wi-Fi hotspot providers in airports are Boingo, T-Mobile, and Wayport. You can check your email and chat with friends. You can also post some comments on Twitter or add some posts to your Blog. As well, before you leave for the airport, load your laptop with fun games. You will find that the time will fly when you are focused on a fun video game.
Enjoy Airport Life: If you are on a tight budget, you can enjoy the scenery in the airport. For instance, the airport is a great way to watch people coming and going as well as watching tearful goodbyes and blissful hellos. People from all over the world pass through airports so you can chat with travelers and learn about where they come from and learn about their lives. There are also books stores that sell books and magazines, so you can take the opportunity to read a good book. If there is a long delay, wander the airport and enjoy the sights and sounds.
Spruce up Your Appearance: The airplane is a closed-in area and the bathrooms are very small. Take some time to stop in the airport bathroom to brush your hair, wash your face, do a make-up touch up, and brush your teeth. You will not only look better, but you will feel refreshed.
Because of the new airport regulations, tighter airport security and a reduction in scheduled flights, boarding a flight for commercial air travel takes much more time than it used to. Bad weather, more security checks, and traffic congestion, has resulted in much longer boarding delays. Fortunately, the airport has much to offer travelers which will make the wait much less boring.
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Only one airport can claim the title of the “world’s oldest, continuously-operating” one. That title belongs to College Park Airport, located in Maryland, some 25 miles from the state’s major facility, Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
College Park’s own origins can be directly traced to the Wright Brothers. Although their sustained, controlled, and powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as well documented, had occurred in 1903, it had not been until 1908, when their attempt to interest the Europeans in their design had generated sufficient interest in it in their own country. The Wright Model A Military Flyer, one of three aircraft submitted to fulfill the US Army Aeronautical Division’s requirements for “a motorized, heavier-than-air flying machine and the training of two pilots,” had first flown from nearby Ft. Myer, Virginia, later that year, but its perilous fate had led to the injury of Orville Wright and the death of its passenger.
The reconstructed aircraft, demonstrating its capabilities during a one-hour flight, had met all specifications: a capacity of two, a 40-mph airspeed, and a 125-mile range, and the design had been handed over to the Army on August 2, 1909. What remained, however, had been the yet-unfilled requirement to train two officers to fly it.
The Ft. Myer site, hitherto location of all test flights, had proven too constrained and had often been surrounded by curious onlookers, and a larger area had clearly been needed. Its replacement, 160 acres of flat land in nearby Maryland, had subsequently been chartered as an airfield after Army Signal Corps Lieutenant Frank Lahm had spotted it from a balloon. The parcel, located near the new Maryland Agricultural College, had been train- and trolley-accessible, yet remote enough to discourage significant numbers of public viewers. It became College Park Airport.
After having been cleared of several trees in October, a small hangar and a launching track to facilitate the wheel-devoid Military Flyer had been constructed, while the actual aircraft had been transported, in a disassembled state, to the new location.
Flight training of Lieutenants Frank P. Lahm and Frederick Humphreys, which began on October 8, resulted in both successfully soloing in little more than three hours, but the latter, achieving the feat first, became both the world’s first military officer to become a pilot and the first to fly a government aircraft in the process. Both were subsequently reassigned within the Army.
Two other “firsts” occurred that year: Mrs. Ralph H. Van Daman became the first woman in the US to fly as a passenger and Lieutenant George Sweet became the first naval officer to fly when he did so with Lahm on November 3.
A hangar, housing the Wright Brothers and ten enlisted men, had served as living quarters during fight instruction.
Rex Smith, an inventor and patent attorney, can be credited with sparking civilian aviation at College Park when he had established the Rex Smith Aeroplane Company and the National Aviation and Washington Aviation Companies had later provided aircraft services and support.
The Wright Model B, succeeding the initial “A” version in 1910 and integral to this operation, had been a two-person, open-cockpit design constructed of West Virginia white spruce whose aluminum powder coating had given it a metallic look. Its dual wings, like those of the original 1903 Wright Flyer of Kitty Hawk fame, had been fabric-covered and bank-induced not by the later-standard ailerons, but instead by the Wright-designed wing-warping method. Powered by a 30-35 hp, four-cylinder, water-cooled Wright engine which drove twin, 8.6-foot, counter-rotating propellers at 428 rpm, the 950-pound aircraft could become airborne at an almost stationary 27 mph and could attain a maximum speed of 40 mph with its long, 38.6-foot wingspan. A dual rudder and equally warped elevator comprised its tail.
An initial deficiency of providing only a single, wing-warping and rudder control lever between the pilots, yet two elevator actuators, had been remedied two years later with the installation of a second wing-warping and rudder control, thus ending the right- and left-seat pilot phenomenon. The type conducted both training and experimental flights. Along with a Wright-Burgess and two Curtiss Pushers, it had formed the aviation school’s initial flight training fleet.
In all, Wilbur Wright had made 55 flights from College Park in 1909, the fastest of which had been at a record-setting 46 mph.
Although the Wrights had left College Park in November of 1909 after their contract had been fulfilled and they had relocated their training school to Ft. Sam in Houston, the seeds planted by the first two Signal Corps pilots had blossomed into a full-fledged military aviation training facility in 1911 when the Army, receiving a Congressional appropriation for Army Aeronautics, had leased 100 more acres of land, constructed additional hangars, and ordered more aircraft, establishing the first Army Aviation School. Indeed, the initial Wright hangar had multiplied into seven, along with a headquarters building and a medical and a mess tent at this time.
Aviation’s foundation continued to be laid that year. The first test of an aircraft bombsight, for instance, had occurred, while College Park had become both the origin of the first cross-country flight and the first military cross country, a 42-mile sector to Frederick, Maryland, in a Burgess-Wright airplane. The first member of Congress had been flown by the US Army and the first aerial photographs had been taken of the airfield at 600-, 1,500-, and 2,000-foot altitudes.
The Bleriot XI, a single-engine, fabric-covered monoplane designed and built in France and named after designer Louis Bleriot, had joined the Curtiss and Wright aircraft at College Park’s National Aeroplane Company in 1911. Powered by a 70-hp Gnome rotary engine, the 661-pound, pilot-only design, with a 25.7-foot “twistable” wingspan, had been the first heavier-than-air airplane to cross the English Channel from Calais to Dover more than a century previously on July 25, 1909 and had served as the basic configuration upon which all current-day aircraft had been based. Its (then) novel, single-wing arrangement, however, had been the reason for the Army’s rejection of the type over the standard biplane configuration after pilots from New York’s Moisant School had demonstrated it to them in Maryland at College Park. Nevertheless, the National Aeroplane Company became the type’s authorized agent for sales in the Washington area.
Aviation “firsts” continued to be notched up in 1912. A “Military Aviator” pilot rating, for example, had been introduced; the first aircraft-installed machine gun had been tested; Lieutenant Hap Arnold had made the first mile-high flight; and, sadly, the first death of a military enlisted man, Corporal Frank S. Scott of the US Army, had occurred.
Civil aviation had increasingly usurped its military counterpart until it had altogether replaced it in 1913 when the Army had relocated to North Island in San Diego as a result of its lease expiration in June. The Rex Smith Aeroplane Company, which had already established its presence there, had designed its own aircraft, and the National Aviation Company had repaired and provided flight instruction in Bleriot, Curtiss, and Wright designs. The Washington Aeroplane Company had built the Columbia Mono- and Bi-Planes during this time.
College Park Airport entered a new chapter in 1918 when the US Post Office had selected it as the location of its first airmail service after a three-month trial from Potomac Park in Washington to Philadelphia and Belmont Park in Long Island, New York. Operated by a Curtiss JN-4H Jenny on August 12, and flown by Max Miller, it had successfully carried the mail to New York.
The Jenny, the workhorse of the US airmail fleet, had a 27.4-foot overall length and a 43.8-foot wingspan. The two-place biplane, powered by an OX-5, liquid-cooled engine, had a 1,430-pound empty weight, but could carry a useful load of 490 pounds, comprised of the pilot in the rear seat and the mail itself in the front. Maximum speed had been 75 mph.
An airmail hangar and compass rose had been constructed in 1919 and 12 aircraft had formed the airmail fleet before the service had been transferred to the transcontinental route from New York in 1921.
Another chapter in College Park’s history had been written in 1924 when the father-and-son team of Emile and Henry Berliner, sponsors of the already-established Washington Aeroplane Company, had conducted the world’s first controlled vertical helicopter flight on February 24 before media and US Navy officials. The Berliner helicopter, employing an 18-foot-long Nieuport 23 fuselage, had featured a 38-foot wingspan in triplane configuration from whose leading and trailing edges shutter-like vanes had horizontally protruded and atop which two 13-foot diameter counter-rotating rotors driven by a 220-hp BR-2 Bentley engine had been installed. The single-seat, 641-pound design rested on a quad-wheeled undercarriage.
Rising to 15 feet, the helicopter had maintained a 40-mph airspeed and a 150-foot maneuvering radius, traveling some 200 yards, although the experimental flight had revealed a power deficiency and inadequate lateral control. Nevertheless, it had led to advancements which had been later incorporated in Igor Sikorsky’s own vertical design of 1940.
College Park Airport had not only been instrumental in vertical flight, but also in blind flight. Between 1927 and 1934, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) had tested and developed radio navigation aids to facilitate zero-visibility flying with hooded biplanes. Jimmy Doolittle, making the first blind landing at Mitchell Field, Long Island, on September 24, 1929, had paved the way for the first such operation at College Park on September 5, 1931, while the first instrument flight, from origin to destination, had been conducted in 1934 between College Park and Newark. The Washington Institute of Technology, taking over the development program, had been able to lay the foundation for today’s instrument landing system (ILS).
Also in 1927, management of the airfield had been handed off to George Brinckerhoff, who had been instrumental in taking it into the Golden Age of Aviation by conducting extensive pilot training and staging frequent air shows, the latter of which, particularly, had introduced the public to aerial flight.
One of the most frequently featured aircraft during these shows had been the Monocoupe 110. Powered by a 145-hp Super Scarab piston engine, the high-wing, 1,611-pound aircraft, with a 20.8-foot overall length and 32-foot wingspan, had been fast, efficient, and aerodynamically sleek for its day and could attain 120- to 148-mph speeds. It had often won speed records at College Park races and air meets.
The two-place, tandem-arranged Taylor J-2 Cub, introduced four years later in 1936, had also been instrumental during this period. The docile, high-wing trainer, with a 22.5-foot overall length and 35.2-foot span, had had a 970-pound gross weight and could attain 87-mph speeds with its single, 40-hp Continental A-40 engine. Used by Brinckerhoff for flight training during a 30-year period, the type had become the quintessential private pilot trainer at general aviation airports throughout the country.
Another prevalent trainer, introduced three years later and featuring improved capability, had been the Taylorcraft CL-65. Unlike the tandem seating configuration of the J-2, the side-by-side arrangement had facilitated dual instruction. The high-wing, tail wheel aircraft, with a 22-foot overall length and 36-foot, fabric-covered wingspan, had been powered by a 65-hp Lycoming O-145 piston engine and, with a 1,150-pound gross weight, could achieve 102-mph maximum speeds.
Another College Park-indicative design, the Aeronica 65LA “Chief,” had plied Maryland skies during the 1940s. Equaling the Taylorcraft’s speed, it had been powered by a 65-hp Continental C-65 engine and had featured a 1,250-pound maximum weight. Only 87 of the type, however, had been produced.
During World War II, the Women’s Air Services Pilots, or WASPs, had trained at College Park under Maryland’s Civilian Pilot Training Program, enabling them to assume non-combat aerial duties.
The Boeing PT-17 Stearman, a two-place, open-cockpit biplane instrumental in the training of pilots, had often performed stunts and competed in air races during the Brinckerhoff period from 1927 to 1964. The aircraft, with a 24.10-foot overall length and a 32.2-foot wingspan, had been powered by a 220-hp Continental R-670 radial engine and, at a maximum gross weight of 2,717 pounds, could achieve 124-mph speeds. More than 8,500 in 11 different versions had been produced for the Army, the Navy, and several countries.
One aircraft, registered N8NP and piloted by Gus McLeod, had become the first open-cockpit biplane to have flown over the North Pole. Departing Gaithersburg, Maryland, in April of 2000, it had penetrated zero-visibility and below-zero temperature conditions on its intended 13-day expedition, finally circling the pole on April 17, but mechanical difficulties had forced it to land. The pilot, returning the following month with the needed replacement battery, had discovered that the ice floe on which it had been located had drifted some 80 miles toward Norway.
After repairs, the Stearman had flown as far as Nunavut in Canada before weather impeded further continuation.
The Ercoupe 415D, designed by the Engineering and Research Corporation (ERCO) which Henry Berliner himself had founded in 1932, had been a low-wing monoplane employing a tricycle undercarriage and twin vertical fins which had been tested at College Park. Powered by an 85-hp Continental A-85 engine, the two-place, 1,400-pound general aviation aircraft, with a 30-foot wingspan, could attain 117-mph speeds and had uniquely offered a coordinated control system by linking the ailerons and rudders by means of the control column. Devoid of rudder pedals, it had facilitated pilot training, and had been considered slip-, stall-, and spin-proof.
In 1973, the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission purchased College Park Airport and four years later it had been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, “the world’s oldest continuously-operating airport,” occupying 40 acres, is a non-towered, general aviation facility with 80 based aircraft and a single, lighted, 2,600-foot runway (15/33). The original airmail hangar and compass rose of 1919 are located at the end of the field below the railroad tracks, while the 27,000-square-foot College Park Aviation Museum, a glass-and-brick, curved roof building inspired by early Wright Brothers designs and an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is located on the side and showcases many historic, airport-related aircraft.
Countless, modern-day turboprop and pure-jet airliners regularly ply the corridor to and from Maryland’s Baltimore-Washington International Airport, perhaps oblivious to the tiny parcel of land called “College Park Airport” below them. But at least a nod of recognition and appreciation should occasionally be extended. This, after all, is where it all began.
A graduate of Long Island University-C.W. Post Campus with a summa-cum-laude BA Degree in Comparative Languages and Journalism, I have subsequently earned the Continuing Community Education Teaching Certificate from the Nassau Association for Continuing Community Education (NACCE) at Molloy College, the Travel Career Development Certificate from the Institute of Certified Travel Agents (ICTA) at LIU, and the AAS Degree in Aerospace Technology at the State University of New York – College of Technology at Farmingdale. Having amassed almost three decades in the airline industry, I managed the New York-JFK and Washington-Dulles stations at Austrian Airlines, created the North American Station Training Program, served as an Aviation Advisor to Farmingdale State University of New York, and devised and taught the Airline Management Certificate Program at the Long Island Educational Opportunity Center. A freelance author, I have written some 70 books of the short story, novel, nonfiction, essay, poetry, article, log, curriculum, training manual, and textbook genre in English, German, and Spanish, having principally focused on aviation and travel, and I have been published in book, magazine, newsletter, and electronic Web site form. I am a writer for Cole Palen’s Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York. I have made some 350 lifetime trips by air, sea, rail, and road.
Car parking at Manchester airport is simple and secure, and provides you with various options according to your flight and terminal. Whether you’re thinking of booking a holiday or you are going on a business trip, when you know you are going to fly from Manchester airport, the easiest thing to do is use the car parking facilities at the airport.
Forget about the expensive taxi ride or the lift from the friend up the road at some ungodly hour. Forget the overcrowded train where you need to carry your suitcases with you everywhere, getting in everyone’s way and tripping over the cases yourself half the time. Think about the easy option which is using the car parking facilities at Manchester airport.
If you are taking your family on holiday what better solution than to just take your own car to the airport. There will be no delays; you are in control of what time you need to leave for the airport. The kids will be familiar with the car and can be seated comfortably in their own car seats for the journey if they are younger kids. You know you can load the cases safely in the boot of the car and that you don’t need to carry them from station to station, as you may need to do if using the bus or train or coach.
If you are a person who likes to have things planned and organised before you leave on your holiday you can pre-book your car parking. This is easy to do online, you decide whether you will be long stay or short stay or whether you want to use the shuttle parking at Manchester airport, enter your dates and pay for your parking.
The long stay car park has a courtesy bus which runs every 15 minutes, all day and all night long, which is convenient and only takes around 15 minutes to get to the terminal. There are 3 terminals at Manchester airport and terminals 1 and 3 use the same long term car park and terminal 2 has its very own long stay car park with a free bus to take you to the terminal. All you need to do is park your car and get yourselves on the bus with your luggage then straight to the terminal building to begin your holiday.
Even if you’ve forgotten to book your car parking at Manchester airport, you can just turn up at the long stay car parks and pick up your ticket from the barrier and pay on exit if that’s what you’d prefer to do. This might be handy for those last minute business trips which often occur. Minimum stay at the long stay car parks is 3 days.
Alternatively, if you want to use the faster shuttle service just book online or call and you will be able to jump on the shuttle after you’ve parked your car. This is a convenient service at competitive prices which you will benefit from if you know you will be in a hurry.
If you are going for a short break then it makes sense to take advantage of the short-term car parking facility at Manchester airport. The short term car park is a multi story car park and there is one next to each terminal building for your convenience. You can get a ticket at the barrier and pay when you leave. Prices are competitive and the short-term car park offers the security of CCTV and security patrols.
Finally, there is valet parking. This service costs a little more and you must book in advance, but the convenience of arriving at the valet reception, dropping off your car and keys and walking the short distance to the terminal building gives you the advantage of not having to park your car at all, the valet will do it for you. The car will be parked in secure parking and you have literally nothing to do except make your way to check-in. On your return, your car will be ready for you to pick up. Less hassle and easy car parking, the only requirement is a minimum three-day stay for your car.
Using Manchester airport car parking facilities is an easy solution to your airport parking problems. All of the car parks are secure, each of the terminals having their own car parks and each have won the ‘Parkmark’ award for safe and secure parking.
Car parking at Manchester airport is the easiest option for any flight, whether it’s a family holiday, a honeymoon, a short break or a business trip, it’s a safe convenient and a cost effective way to park your car.
For further information on Manchester airport car parking facilities visit where you will also find details of parking and other facilities at the major UK airports.
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