Throughout my adulthood, I’ve always been one to love learning the “behind the scenes” stuff. Whether it’s visiting the Warner Brothers Studios in the UK, or going on long-gone behind the scenes tours at Walt Disney World back in the mid-1990s, I love learning how all the little nitty gritty things make an operation run.
About a decade ago, San Francisco International Airport produced a few dozen short films called Inside SFO. They were a fascinating look into how the airport runs, with each video focusing on a certain aspect of SFO, such as the Air Traffic Control Tower, window washers, noise abatement, what happens when Air Force One arrives, etc.
I recently found a similar video that goes into the inner workings of an airport. Except this one goes into a very special airport – Hartfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), which has been ranked the world’s busiest airport every year (except 2020) since 1998.
An extraordinary all-areas-pass into the world’s busiest airport – Hartfield Jackson Atlanta – with over 100 million passengers a year. It reveals a unique combination of jaw-dropping scale and surprisingly intimate stories, building up a picture of the daily challenges faced by some of its 63,000 staff.
The video goes into multiple aspects of the inner workings of the famed (and busy!) airport:
- What happens inside the ramp tower and how they coordinate with the ground crew
- A quick look at one of the pilots’ lounges
- Running the 3-mile long automated railway under the airport that transports passengers and crew between terminals
- The airport’s 35 miles of ATL’s high tech baggage highway, how TSA inspects checked luggage (and if your bag has tools, electronics or liquid containers in it, it WILL be checked), and how they sort luggage to their correct flights
- What can be done if you’re a Delta passenger and have a really tight connection (Delta Porsche transfer service)
- A taste of what air traffic control does
- TSA security and its K9s
- Food and beverage entities at ATL, and how their employees and materials are checked for security
- How ATL works to decrease bird strikes
- Delta’s aircraft maintenance hangar & where they keep their trillions of spare parts
- The essential maintenance completed at the airport, most of which is done on the overnights (i.e. checking the lights on the runways, mowing the airfield, indoor cleaning, maintenance and construction inside the terminals, etc.)
- The work of Customs & Border Protection (CBP) and its K9s, both on planes and in the terminals
The video, produced by Berlin-based Free Documentary, is a little longer than an hour, but if you have any interest in the inner workings of how airports do what they do, it’s worth a watch. Here it is…
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