Life lived between takeoffs and landings

Flying into Vancouver on a clear fall afternoon is something. If you're coming from the east, you might well skim the Coast Mountain peaks all the way from Hope, swing out over Howe Sound with the city below, and come in low over the delta, the sun glinting off the water that snakes across the dark Fraser River silt.

It's one of the world's great arrivals. The actual airport never could and never will compete. Sure, the old 1968 Zoltan Kiss–designed terminal was a fine modern building, far more distinguished as architecture than the anonymous ocean-green glass that now nearly obliterates it. But the endless tunnel that awaited international arrivals always seemed to portend a trip to a windowless interrogation room.

Now the entrances are those of, um, some sort of Olympian casino. There are soothing water features to calm the smokers until they can get outside, and some very beautiful, if a bit obvious, Coast Salish and Haida artwork. It's ironic, of course, that aboriginal sculptures figure so prominently in the airport, given that the advent of global transportation nearly killed them all, but there's irony everywhere you look in these postmodern times.

As such, will the Canada Line's airport spur, which is expected to charge weary travellers $6.25, remind us of the old Expo 86 monorail, which helped celebrate the miracle of transportation but always seemed to run empty? Now, as then, we go to great lengths when company is coming, and we sometimes gamble away things that would simply be good for us. Like enough buses.

But hey, our airport still looks pretty good, and it works. It's close to the city and easy to reach. It has planes, and they fly all over the place.

Its governance–since 1992, it has been run by the Vancouver International Airport Authority, a nonprofit entity with a quite credible board appointed by governments and professional associations–isn't directly publicly accountable. The airport is in Richmond, but it's not of Richmond. It doesn't pay local taxes, it makes payments in lieu of taxes. When you exist under the auspices of the federal government, you can do almost anything you want.

Still, the airport's uniquely Canadian structure has been effective. YVR has the lowest big-airport landing fees in the country, lower than they were back in 1992, which makes it competitive, which has helped it grow. Traffic has quadrupled since 1974 and nearly doubled since 1992. A 2000 economic-impact study suggested the airport generates 26,000 jobs. It even tries, in an industry that can only dress up its environmental sins in cellophane, to be green (although the last annual report suggests it does have a little trouble meeting its modest goals).

At least the airport is not vacuuming excessive amounts of money out of our pockets, except for that despised Airport Improvement Fee, which–like that income-tax thing they cooked up during the First World War–was supposed to be temporary. Remember when former airport CEO David Emerson told us that the fee was an interim measure to fund new construction, and that they collected it in cash at the gate so it would be transparent? Was that the first sign that the turncoat Vancouver Kingsway Conservative MP is not a man of his word?

Now the fee provides about a quarter of the airport's revenue, it's buried in your ticket price, and we've got it "for the foreseeable future"–which, in any language I understand, means until the apocalypse comes.

This, some believe, could come sooner rather than later where airports are concerned. Will airports be among the first major casualties when the world's oil runs low and pirated Asian naval vessels roam the Pacific Ocean, as The Long Emergency author James Howard Kunstler argues?

Or will Vancouver's airport just grow and grow and grow, as YVR's draft master plan suggests? The plan projects an increase in passenger volume from 2005's 16.4 million to, in 2027, somewhere between 26.9 million and 40.5 million.

If the airport authority is right that China's growth and Vancouver's gateway role will keep our airport booming, we'll keep flying until English Bay is a tropical beach and the former Sea Island runways are platforms in the ocean.

Until the waters rise, however, Sea Island will remain a well-polished pit stop between here and the air, with some idiosyncratic fringes that can actually make it worth a day trip.

Best place to find unusual aviation items

Aviation World
105–6080 Russ Baker Way
604-718-8400

The idiosyncratic airport bookstore, Bomber Joe's, is gone, bought out last year by this pan-Canadian rival, but there's still plenty of curious merchandise here for plane buffs. Want a scale model of a de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver floatplane? An Avro ball cap? The 2006 edition of Jet Airline Production List: Volume 2? The three-hour-long DVD Iran Air: The Airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran? A startling array of aircraft flight simulators for amateur pilots who want a short but very spectacular cockpit career?

Worst place to get arrested

U.S. Customs and Border Protection preclearance area

Some have characterized it as a little piece of U.S. soil within Canada. In reality, this prescreening area that allows YVR travellers to arrive in the U.S. as domestic passengers represents a welter of conflicting legal and jurisdictional issues that constitute a minor industry.

Best place to find overfed Torontonians trying to cope with their difficult withdrawal

Harvey's, Domestic Terminal arrivals level

Not so very long ago, this burger joint was the only place those from Ontario seeking a better life in Vancouver could avail themselves of the peculiarly addictive custom-built flame-broiled burgers so central to the culture of the saddest hockey city in the world. Added bonus for homesick easterners who only eat chicken: now it's a Harvey's Swiss Chalet. Of course, Vancouver and Richmond Home Depots have since expanded Harvey's western reach with in-store franchises, so the desperate can now get a Harvey's burger and complimentary parking.

Best place to eat lunch with the airport's working class

The seating area behind Harvey's Swiss Chalet

This dumpy food-court backroom, with a few sad-looking arcade games along one wall, is where you're most likely to sit next to some slave-wage cleaner or security guard.

Best place to eat lunch while watching your Airbus come in

Jetside Bar, Fairmont Vancouver Airport Hotel
3111 Grant McConachie Way
604-207-5200

You can pay $30 to get into a swank international post-security lounge, or you can hang out as long as possible on the other side of the wickets and spend the money on a hamburger ($17) and a glass of Sumac Ridge Black Sage Merlot ($13). Or you can drop $21 on a Cosmo 2K cocktail and leave a big tip. The dinner menu at the Fairmont's restaurant, Globe@yvr, is more in line with local prices, with most entrées under $30. Both have an excellent view, through soundproofing triple-pane glass, of the planes coming and going.

Best place to eat lunch

The Flying Beaver
4760 Inglis Drive, next to the Harbour Air terminal
604-273-0278

If you work around the South Terminal, this riverside pub is the only eatery that matters. If you're chartering out to one of those extravagant fishing lodges or taking a scheduled floatplane trip to visit ailing Uncle Arnie in Nanaimo, go early and fortify yourself with a pint. If you've got nothing to do late one afternoon and scattered clouds promise a beautiful sunset, go for dinner and two pints. This Mark James Group pub could be faulted for having all the authentic touches that only a certified restaurant designer can provide, but that's a trifling quibble. It's a truly great place to eat a burger or a bowl of chowder, watch the sun go down, and revel in a scene that is pure Vancouver.

Last empty soccer field

Corner of Terrace Street and Jericho Road

In an area near the Sea Island Purolator depot that is otherwise absolutely nowhere is a very quiet sports field, next to nothing but a bunkerlike concrete structure and a boarded-up shed. We have been assured that it's used by field-starved Richmond soccer players, but no one can tell us why it was created there in the first place.

Best small town in the big city

Burkeville, at Sea Island's eastern end

This anomalous community of 300-odd charming little bungalows, built to house Boeing employees near the end of the Second World War, is rife with barking dogs chasing kids on bikes. The Sea Island School has 50 kids in K–3, after which the children are bussed to the big smoke across the river in Richmond. It's Pleasantville, but with a special soundtrack. (See next item.)

Best place to field-test your earplugs

Airport Park
Airport Road and Russ Baker Way, just south of Burkeville

Just as railways have trainspotters, airports attract weird aviation addicts who want to collect the whole set, and sometimes they hang out at this barren triangle of parkland, quivering in anticipation of a glimpse of the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner screaming off the runway just overhead. Sometimes, though, all you'll find at the place known to some as Glidepath Park is a man and his Doberman and an overweight sunbather. It's instructive at the little concrete plaza, however, to learn that Paris (7,919 kilometres away) is closer to the Vancouver airport than Seoul (at 8,176 kilometres). Blame Canada's international aviation agreements for the fact that we have to go to Seattle for a direct flight to the city on the Seine.

Best place to meet a foreign billionaire with a condominium "cottage" in the "village by the sea"

Million Air
5455 Airport Road South
604-273-6688

This branch of a North American franchise is one of the airport's "fixed base operators" or FBOs – others are Esso Avitat and Landmark Aviation – that provide services to your friends and ours who have personal jets. Looking to marry money, or just want to catch a ride to Tucson? Put on your best airs and come on down.

Most expensive potential noise-abatement program

The foreshore runway

The airport's draft master plan to 2027 projects that a third runway may be required, but not until 2025. The two options being seriously considered are a "south parallel runway" and a "foreshore runway" extending out into the Fraser Delta across the tip of the Iona Island jetty. The latter option has two major downsides: real environmental degradation and a $1.2-billion price tag. The former, according to the plan, would increase the number of people affected by unacceptable noise levels by 4,590 to 24,620, but it would cost just $300 million. Public consultations indicated the foreshore runway is preferred, but at a cost of $196,000 for each of those 4,590 people.

Best place to meet with a weird cycling club, an antisocial dog-walker, or a sewage fetishist

Iona Beach Regional Park

This Metro Vancouver park is north of the airport, past the fields where hippies used to pick Psilocybe mushrooms, past the federally managed habitat conservation area, past the Sea Island Equestrian Centre that's doomed by airport expansion, past the McDonald Beach boat launch, past the hectares of log booms that illustrate the plight of rural B.C. economies, across the isthmus, and past the Iona Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. There are birds out here in the winter, and it's much closer to downtown than the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary.

Best places to find airports deemed better than ours

Asia and Germany

The International Air Travel Association gave Vancouver one of two 2007 Eagle awards for customer satisfaction, cost management, and consistent improvement. Skytrax (www.airlinequality.com/) ranks the world's major airports based on consumer opinion and gives ours four stars, along with Amsterdam, Athens, Billund, Cape Town, Helsinki, Kuala Lumpur, London City, Melbourne, Perth, Vienna, and Zurich. The airports with five stars are Hong Kong, Munich, Seoul, and Singapore. Skytrax named YVR the 2007 North American airport of the year. The best U.S. airport is New York's JFK Airport, with just three stars. However, J.D. Power and Associates' consumer-satisfaction survey of medium-sized airports (www.jdpower.com/travel/ratings/airport/medium) ranks a host of U.S. facilities ahead of ours. Vancouver is rated below average in all survey categories, with two out of five, and Kansas City International is tops with an overall rating of five out of five.

Best place to celebrate Halloween 365 days a year

Peaceful Meadows Mausoleum
1051 Hudson, Burkeville

A Burkevillian man-child named Tim is the proud architect of an elaborate house-of-horrors garage-expansion project. Its charcoal-coloured turrets and corpselike faces attract about 3,000 visitors each year at the end of October. His wife, Lorraine, says he's been at it for 26 years. She adds that they've stopped giving out candy. "It was just insane."

Best place to house the homeless during the 2010 Olympics

The Vancouver International Airport, of course

It already has an extremely large transient population of people sleeping on benches and living out of their suitcases, so what's the problem with a few hundred more? They can even scam a ride into town during the day on the new Canada Line to do some binning or squeegeeing. And there's precedent. A certain well-dressed "Mr. Brown" got away with it a while back. He even convinced the folks at the Fairmont Vancouver Airport Hotel to hold his bags for him until his "flight". So we don't need to actually build housing for the homeless, we just need to buy them some respectable clothes and Louis Vuitton luggage, and borrow a couple of jets that are idle for the night to keep the homeless out of sight when they might become conspicuous.