Flight control

The other week I returned to Delhi via Bangalore's new airport and am happy to report that it is light years ahead of state-of-the-art. What makes it truly path-breaking is its location: it is far from Bangalore. No one seems to know just how far from Bangalore the Bangalore airport is. But everyone agrees that it is very far. Maybe it is even very, very far.This inability to very-fy the exact farness of Bangalore airport from Bangalore city poses conundrums of Einsteinian space-time relativity. For instance, exactly how much ahead of check-in time should one depart the city to reach the airport, bearing in mind the virtual inevitability of the traffic snarl-ups that have become endemic to Bangalore? Some are of the opinion that a simple rule-of-thumb formula gives you a fairly good approximation of the journey time: multiply your flight number by the square root of the security personnel employed in frisking passengers, divided by the percentage of intelligible words in any given announcement made over the public address system ('*z%&$ airlines announces the departure of *@!$ to %$*@! All passengers are requested to proceed to Gate No *$%*@') and you'll get a rough idea, in hours and minutes, of the time it'll take you to reach the airport. Others disagree, pointing out that watches are inadequate instruments with which to try and calculate journey time to the airport, which is best computed through the use of a calendar, preferably one based on the Vedic system of lunar calibration. For instance, if the flight that you are proposing to take is on a (full moon) Tuesday, you should set off for the airport on the previous Thursday, unless the numerals comprising the date of that day add up to the inauspicious number 7, in which case you'd best consult your personal astrologer, or a railway timetable, whichever is closer to hand.
The distance of the new Bangalore airport from Bangalore city raises questions of a philosophical nature as well. Getting there represents the how of the airport, so to speak; the why of the airport (as in 'Why is it where it is') gives rise to a different debate. According to cynics the location of the airport was chosen with a view to property speculation. Going by this logic, the airport was sited as far off from the city as possible so that those in the know could buy up all the land between the city and the airport at dirt-cheap rates and then sit back and watch the prices soar. The closer the airport was to the city, the less the connective land between the two, and the less the moolah to be made; the farther the airport was from the city, the more the real estate in between, and the more the booty to be had.
This mercenary explanation fails to plumb the real reason for the location of Bangalore airport, which is to revolutionise the entire concept of airports, and of flying. What is an airport? A place which facilitates flying. And what happens when people fly? They leave a carbon footprint, which gets Al Gore and R K Pachauri so worked up that they start flying all over the place telling people not to fly and thereby leaving an even bigger carbon footprint in their wake. Placing airports as far from cities as possible not only deters people from flying but also makes for shorter flights between airports. The new Bangalore airport, for example, is halfway to Delhi. Now if Delhi airport were similarly to shift halfway to Bangalore, Delhi and Bangalore would have one airport. Similarly, other cities could follow suit so that the whole country will eventually have just one airport (located where Nagpur now is) which people travel overland to and from, thus obviating flying, and carbon footprinting, altogether. And we will have disinvented the Wright brothers and achieved the ultimate in flight control.