ABSTRACT
There are multiple ways of knowing an airport. One can study its architecture as an expression of the ideals of modernity and ‘flow’ (Pascoe 2001; Misa et al. 2003) or reflect on the relativity of its (im)mobilities (Adey 2007). The airport has been portrayed as the quintessential ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995; Castells 1996) and as the locus of the merging of global and local politics of mobility and sustainability (Kesselring 2006). Yet, in all these accounts, relatively little attention has been paid to the actual work that is required to render reliable worldwide air travel on a daily basis. In this chapter, I focus on the practicalities of everyday air travel from the perspective of a large airline, the French/Dutch company Air France-KLM.1 This study is based on ethnographic research at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AAS) that started a number of years ago from a question that is at once simple and highly complex in its repercussions: where is time in an airport?
