A brief trip to San Francisco led to an encounter with Terminal 3, a relatively new facility that houses the West Coast hub of United Airlines. It's certainly nice enough. But as a major transcontinental hub for what is currently the world's largest airline, it's a major let-down.
First the good news. It's new and clean, and reasonably uncluttered by retail distractions. You don't feel like you're in a shopping mall. You don't feel like you're being subjected to a retail environment designed to suck every last dollar out of your wallet. You know you're in an airport. You can see the aircraft and the field beyond, such as here, in a long connecting corridor:
And in a nice touch, a gate concourse atrium has replicas of vintage aircraft hanging in a few places.
And yes, it seems to move passengers in and out efficiently, though not by means of any exciting innovations. It's all been done before, same as anywhere else.
But coming in and then heading out, the place seemed a little antiseptic. It's a little too white, a little too cool. A little too blandly corporate, as if it were built on spec in the hopes that somebody in search of Class A airline terminal space would move in, which surprised me. Get a load of this scene:
Why is this a lost opportunity? Because United, the sole occupant of Terminal 3, is a long-term tenant at SFO, one of the carrier's longtime strongholds. This airport has been the airline's original transcontinental base going back to the dawn of commercial aviation. It's also where United first flung Boeing 377 Stratocruisers out into the Pacific after World War II to conquer Hawaii and turn it into the major tourist destination it is today.
Later still, when United acquired Pan Am's Pacific routes in 1985, no station on the network felt the impact more than SFO. Its importance broadened into a global hub connecting far-flung Pacific rim destinations from Seoul and Sydney to Bangkok and Beijing.
Is any of this reflected in the terminal that greeted me when I stepped off my 757 from Boston? No? Instead, I got an off-the-shelf gate area that fronted a corridor with a raised ceiling, yes. But it could have been anywhere. The color was white and the contours included chunky rounded angles. It's like they made a deal to subliminally promote Marshmallow Fluff.
In most of the terminal, the only thing setting off the white white white was floor coverings that were drab drab drab, featuring a pattern designed to evoke -- I don't know, muddy pasta?
It seemed especially in-your-face in low-ceiling passages such as the one above. Yes, nothing evokes the aspirational aspect of flight than a tunnel with a depressing carpet pattern. Did United authorize this to make their cabin interiors seem clean by comparison?
Seriously, I was at a loss. Instead of saying anything about what kind of airline United was, the place was as blankly corporate as the way United's uninspired post-merger "compromise" livery: the Continental tail and blue/gold colors, UNITED in a blah all-caps font on the plane, and we're done. Out went the tulip and the remnants of three paint schemes still on some of the United fleet. We're lucky they kept Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' on the payroll.
Look at this below. Airport, or bank lobby, or shopping mall? Or blank dull nothing?
If this scene were a person, it would be a robot. With plants.
As a major hub for the combined carrier, you think there'd be a little hometown pride evident in a new and modern terminal. Instead, we get a few plants and, incredibly, an exhibit about vintage sewing machines. Sewing machines?
About the plants: Weirdly, at one place they come in huge sizes that seem out of proportion with human beings. This is just scary, like a scene out of 'Little Shop of Horrors.' Someone tell those people not to get too close!
Contrast this with what United enjoys at Chicago O'Hare: the jazzy Terminal One complex, designed by Helmut Jahn in the late 1980s to accommodate Chicago's role as the airline's major transfer hub in the post-dereg era. Even 25 years of creeping commercial crud can't diminish the excitement that this place lends the flying experience, even if you're just changing planes.
In United's San Francisco hub, you get all the excitement of a conference room in the company where Dilbert works. There's art here and there, but it seems to be the result of someone's checklist rather than any coherent plan to celebrate journeying or the magic of flight.
Even when they try, as in this stairway corridor in the check-in area, the effect is rather cold and heavy and plastic, as if the decorative scheme was based on the uniforms of Darth Vader's Imperial Storm Troopers.
Maybe I'm missing something, but as I walked from the gate to the baggage area and then to hotel shuttle van curb, Terminal 3 said nothing to me about where I was or the airline I just flew and its long and storied presence here. Instead of feeling like I was part of a long tradition of a great city welcoming travellers from all over the world, I felt like I was attending a newspaper advertising sales conference at the Holidome in Topeka, Kansas. What a lost opportunity.
Out on the curb, I finally noticed something that indicated a little pride of place. It was a banner celebrating the return of the A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft, to regular service at SFO.
The airline? Lufthansa, which doesn't even use this terminal.
P.S. I got a chance to peak briefly at the adjacent international terminal, another gleaming new facility. This is what we're putting up against the massive showplaces in Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and elsewhere. It's another future-is-now disappointment, filled with spaces such as these:
It may be new, but it's all a small-minded pale shadow of the Asian airports with which it competes.
