Awful airport
I could not agree more with Robert corm a ck( letters ,7 september) about the dire state of Edinburgh Airport. We used to have a nice wee airport at Turnhouse, but now we have a monster whose last thought is for traveller convenience and comfort.munich, our twin city, used to have a decent small airport at Riem, but has replaced it with a magnificent giant, the Franz Josef Strauss airport, with an underground stop in its basement, a multiplicity of escalators and spacious areas around the gates. what is so wrong with us that we couldn’ t be as successful?
At edinburgh airport there is a Special Assistance office whose staff are exemplary. The snag is, as Prof Cormack implies, that it is a long way from the vehicle drop-off point, and can be accessed only on foot. Whoever designed this external space was certainly not thinking about the elderly, disabled or heavily encumbered. Inside the terminal, the facilities at international gates are poor to awful and, as far as I know, there are no airbridges.
The result is that travellers with hand baggage must negotiate two flights of stairs down to the aircraft or upstairs from the aircraft. If the good lord had intended us to carry hand baggage up and down stairs, without benefit of escalators, he would not have invented wheeled cases. International travellers must traverse a dim and weirdly painted corridor on arrival, and then climb two flights of stairs. I was told that arrivals were required to climb stairs, walk a long distance and then descend stairs so that they would not be able to complain about waiting too long in the baggage reclaim area.
Prof Cormack rightly calls Edinburgh Airport the “Turnhouse Beerhall and Shopping Mall ”. it is a revenue-generating scheme at which accessing one’ s flight is made as in convenient as possible.
Jill Stephenson
Edinburgh