If you’re unfortunate enough to do a lot of traveling for your job, it may often seem like you’re living in an airport. You may feel like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” wandering around the airport like it’s your home, turning terminals into living rooms, airport bakeries into your personal kitchen, the restroom into your daily make over station.
In this economy, however, this is a situation many pilots, airport mechanics, and flight attendants live with every day. Declines in air travel since September 11th, coupled with outbreaks of swine and bird flu, have grounded the flying economy, forcing many pilots and other airport workers to take pay cuts. Finding it too expensive to maintain a home for their families as well as an apartment near where they work, many of these employees choose to camp out permanently at the Lax Parking Lot at the airport, staying in campers and RV’s on airport property while they are working.
According to a recent article in the LA Times, Lax Parking Lot B has been converted into a makeshift campground for airport employees. On top of not being able to enjoy their own homes while they are working, residents of the parking lot contend with turbo jets roaring 500 feet above their camper living rooms every four minutes. Still, it beats paying for a separate apartment, a luxury that has just become too expensive in the wake of pay cuts the airline industry has suffered in the economic downturn. It also beats a 12-hour or more commute.
Many of these workers blacken their windows with foil and brown paper bags to be able to sleep during the day. A white noise machine, a small tape player that transmits sounds like a washing machine, helps to muffle the sound of airplanes taking off. With limited water supplies, residents often take showers at fitness centers to save on water.
Still, life can be rough when your at-work home turf is less than 3,500 feet from the south runway of the Los Angeles airport. Aside from the noise, residents must deal with chain link fencing, crumbling gray asphalt, endless approaching lights and rows and rows of beige and white Rvs, not an ideal home environment.
Still, there are worse things than living in a trailer lot next to the airport. In 2005, the airport didn’t require residents to be airport employees. Renovations at Dockweiler State Beach sent many campers to the airport parking lot, along with a steady supply of garden gnomes, lawn furniture, and barbecues, creating a party scene that led to a lot of problems, noise and abuse. Two prostitutes even moved in, including one in her 60s with a penchant for tight skirts and high heels. Living in sleaze central, the airport employee residents complained and police got involved, removing unregistered campers as well as the prostitutes. Airport regulations later limited the parking lot to only airport residents. Barbecues and lawn decorations have also been banned as well.
Still, the parking lot is what these people call home, at least when they are working too far from their own homes. While social gatherings are small and don’t happen often, there is the occasional happy hour in one of the larger rigs, some of which have satellite TV, plush carpeting and homier wooden cabinetry.
The airport may be a pad to crash in, but it takes a little effort to call it home. The next time you are stuck at the airport, living off airport food, sleeping in terminals, wondering when you’ll ever make it home, count your blessings. You could be a professional pilot, have a really great job, but be sleeping on the runway in a Lax Parking lot in between trans-continental flights, burying your head in a pillow to muffle the sound of a jet rocketing the runway.