6 airports you don't want to get stuck in

Carlos Ortiz / Getty Images

A traveler sleeps on a baggage carousel at Chicago's Midway Airport after flights were canceled during a December 2005 snowstorm.

By By Sascha Segan, Frommers.com

Many airports are awful. Some are lovely, like the 10 prettiest airport terminals we profiled last week. But most are at best joyless econoboxes, at worst purgatorial warehouses of stalled lives.

Some airports deserve special condemnation, though. In some cases, they deserve to be literally condemned. Assembling this top 10 list of misfits, I scanned professional surveys and delay statistics and asked my frequent-traveler friends to come up with the 10 airports where you'd least like to spend an extra hour.

I'm sticking to major airports here. There are small airports around the world that consist of a shanty that swelters in the summer and freezes in the winter, with a hole in the wall for baggage claim and a single sad concession stand. (I'm actually describing my experience at Udaipur Airport in India in 1999.) But that's not fair. These 10 airports should deliver better service, and they don't.?

Frommers.com slideshow: More tragic terminals

Chicago Midway Airport
Chicago's Midway airport ranked as the nation's worst for on-time departures in the most recent federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, earning it a spot on this list. It isn't a bad place to hang out, with a new food court and a frequent subway connection to downtown Chicago, but any airport is the worst airport if you're stuck there and you aren't getting on a plane.

Consider this the least-worst of our set of bad airports. Midway's curse may come more from Chicago's notoriously difficult weather than from any problem the airport itself can fix.

"Paris" Beauvais Airport, France
A solid fifty miles north of Paris, this depressing low-cost box of an airport in Picardy got saddled with a bait-and-switch name by Ryanair, the ultimate bait-and-switch airline. It rated as one of the world's worst airports by Frommers.com friends SleepingInAirports.net because of its lack of seating, lack of services, and general half-tent, half-warehouse atmosphere.

It lacks a rail link to Paris and closes overnight, so hope that your flight doesn't get too delayed, or you may be camping out on the lawn.

LaGuardia Airport US Airways Terminal, New York City
I don't hate LaGuardia, but it was recently rated the worst major airport in America by both JD Power and Associates and Zagat Survey, so who am I to argue?

LaGuardia has no rail link to anywhere -- even between its own terminals -- and regularly suffers from congestion, overcrowding, and delays. While its terminals are shaping up, they're still each smaller and with fewer services than you'd expect from an airport at one of the top tourist destinations in the world.

I'm giving the US Airways Terminal the worst-terminal award here because at least the central terminal has an atrium and the Delta terminal just got some new food options. The US Airways terminal is dull and sad.

Moscow Sheremtyevo Airport Terminal B/C, Russia
One of the two airports rated "two stars" by global consulting firm Skytrax (nobody got one star), SVO B/C got particularly bad marks for anything where you have to interact with airport staff: their attitude, their language skills, and the speed with which they process passengers.?

Reviewers suggest that you brush up on your Russian if you intend to transfer flights, because signboards and staff tend not to work in English. Apparently, you can fix up a Russian airport, but it's harder to fix up Russian customer service. (In capitalist Russia, customer services you!)

Depressingly, SVO Terminal B/C is partially a new terminal, but it still got one or two-star rankings from Skytrax on "leisure facilities," "baggage hall," and "meet and greet." It's also several miles away from the rest of the airport and from its rail station, making inter-terminal connections difficult. Air France cautions "Take official claims of short transfer times with a pinch of salt: delays of up to two hours have been reported."

Manila Airport Terminal 1, Philippines
Last May, the ceiling at Manila airport's Terminal 1 caved in, injuring two people. That's part of why Sleeping in Airports rated it the world's worst terminal last year.

"The terminal has been a frequent target of criticism with travellers and the business community complaining it is congested, run-down and filthy, with toilets that do not work," Agence France Presse commented. According to SleepingInAirports.net, bribery and theft are also rampant in the terminal.

The negative press attention seems to have had some effect; this November the Philippine government said it would renovate the terminal starting in January. It looks like changes can't come too soon.

JFK Airport Terminal 3, New York City
In 1960, Pan American Airlines built the Worldport: a grand, flying-saucer-shaped gateway to the Jet Age.

Fifty one years later, this decrepit, crumbling chunk of concrete is still used by Delta as an international hub. Terminal 3 is the worst single airport terminal in America, and probably in the Western world. Even Delta acknowledges this: they're tearing it down and replacing it with a giant glass structure connected to the nearby Terminal 4. It's unsalvageable.

Terminal 3 is known for endless immigration lines in a dank basement, for an utter lack of food and shopping options, three crowded and confusing entry points, hallways that could have been designed by M.C Escher and for vomiting international travelers out onto an underground sidewalk with no cabs available. There's also a sense that the cleaning crew gave up in despair a while ago.

JFK's terminals range from the awful to the mediocre, but Delta's hubs take the rotten, worm-infested cake. Right next to T3 there's Terminal 2, an ugly box with an undermanned security line where I really hope you're never caught hungry.

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Source: http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/28/9773678-6-airports-you-dont-want-to-get-stuck-in

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Ill Hawking misses birthday event

8 January 2012 Last updated at 15:43 ET By David Shukman Environment & science correspondent, BBC News

British scientist Stephen Hawking has had to miss a symposium to mark his 70th birthday because of ill health.

Professor Hawking was discharged from hospital only on Friday, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, told the event.

A recorded speech was played to the symposium, at the university, instead.

In it, Prof Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease aged 21, urged the continued exploration of space "for the future of humanity".

He used his talk, entitled A Brief History of Mine, to warn that the human race would not "survive another thousand years" without beginning to colonise other parts of space.

As well as running through his personal history and pronouncements on the future of the human race, he also used the conclusion of the speech to call on people to "be curious".

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist," he said.

He went on to say it had been "a glorious time to be alive, and doing research in theoretical physics".

"Our picture of the universe has changed a great deal in the last 40 years and I am happy to have made a small contribution.

"The fact that we humans who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph."

'Warm applause'

The auditorium at Cambridge University was packed with leading scientists, businessmen and members of the public including entrepreneur Richard Branson and model Lily Cole.

Continue reading the main story

Analysis

Jonathan Fildes BBC News

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Prof Hawking communicates using an optical device that interprets twitches of his cheek muscles to point at different words on a computer that can then be voiced using a speech synthesiser.

Currently he is able to select about a word a minute using the system, making the task of writing speeches, such as the 30 minutes he wrote for Sunday, an arduous and impressive task.

However, work is under way to attempt to improve this system.

This week a team from chip giant Intel - who developed a lot of the technology the professor uses - will arrive in Cambridge to assess whether a new approach can be used.

Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, said the team were considering new options to allow Prof Hawking to communicate including brainwave analysis and 3D facial recognition cameras.

But any new technology would have to be approved by the notoriously stubborn academic, who reportedly does not want to learn a cumbersome new system and wants to preserve his distinctive electronic voice.

"That's the easiest thing. He has had the option for many years for newer and better voices. But in many senses that voice has become his voice," said Mr Rattner.

Hopes had been high that Prof Hawking's health would allow him to attend Sunday's gathering.

But when Sir Leszek opened the event, he announced that Prof Hawking would not be able to attend.

The vice-chancellor went on to say that if Prof Hawking was listening he wished him a very happy birthday.

At that, the audience reacted with long and warm applause.

The public symposium also heard from Astronomer Royal Lord Rees, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Saul Perlmutter, and one of the world's leading theoretical physicists Professor Kip Thorne.

Prof Thorne played tribute to Prof Hawking, saying he was a "dominant figure in research and the communication of that research".

"And overcoming his severe disability provides inspiration for us all," he told the BBC.

He also said Prof Hawking's words in his speech were spoken out of modesty.

"He is one of the great figures of the 20th Century and continues to be a major contributor in the 21st," he said.

Prof Hawking also had to miss three days of a science conference, entitled The State of the Universe, held in his honour.

Despite Prof Hawking spending most of his life as a wheelchair user and being able to speak only through a computer, the theoretical physicist's quest for the secrets of the universe has made him arguably the most famous scientist in the world.

As well as transforming aspects of modern physics, he has also found a new audience for his theories when he published A Brief History of Time.

The best-seller, published in 1988, went on to sell 10m copies - although many people famously admit to never finishing the tome.

"Not everyone may have finished it or understood everything they read," Prof Hawking told the Cambridge audience.

"But they at least got the idea that we live in a universe governed by rational laws that we can discover and understand."

Many experts say Prof Hawking has defied medical science by reaching the age of 70 with motor neurone disease, a degenerative illness that usually proves fatal within five years of diagnosis.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-16461928

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