Chronologically, I guess this should be "Airworld, pt. I." For their roving reporter travel series, Ad Age comes up with:
Inside Airworld
Airworld is the name we have given to the invisible country that begins
on the other side of the x-ray machines and extends in all directions
beyond the concourses as the air corridors through which our airplanes
fly. Among other things, this closed system of terminals and shuttling
aircraft is its own vast media and retail ecosystem. Taken as a whole,
it is one of the largest coherent stand-alone marketing venues on earth.
Which led me back to Walter Kirn's 2002 book, Up in the Air. From the first chapter (at the WNYC reading room):
I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are
USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The big-screen Panasonics in the club
rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the
weather. My literature-yours, too, I see-is the bestseller or the
near-bestseller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance, and the goodness of
common people in small towns. In Airworld, I've found, the passions and
enthusiasms of the outlying society are concentrated and whisked to a stiff
froth. When a new celebrity is minted in the movie theaters or ballparks, this
is where the story breaks-on the vast magazine racks that form a sort of trading
floor for public reputations and pretty faces. I find it possible here, as
nowhere else, to think of myself as part of the collective that prices the long
bond and governs necktie widths. Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its
own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency-the token economy of
airline bonus miles that I've come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn't
degrade them. They're not taxed. They're private property in its purest form.
