Travel Guide

That’s what makes this new skyscraper all the more exciting. Standing at 200 meters above ground, when completed in 2022 Airside will become the tallest landmark occupying the old airport land.

As well as breathing new life into a part of Hong Kong that has been largely undeveloped since the airport’s closure, it will no doubt stir some nostalgia for the days when gigantic airplanes would be photographed descending through the city’s residential tower blocks.

While a shiny new building isn’t likely to draw comparisons to the gray boxy structure of Kai Tak’s terminal, the team behind it say they took note of the airport’s vertiginous landing descent when considering their design and wanted to pay homage to its dramatic aviation heritage.

The project, with an investment of HKD 32 billion ($4.12 billion) will comprise an office building and a retail complex under the concept of “wholeness.”

“Whilst respecting the historical context of the site, our initial concepts for the development took inspiration in the diversity of commercial, recreational and retail functions and the opportunity this gave to generate a series of rich and interactive public spaces throughout the development,” Robert Greenwood, Snøhetta’s managing director in Asia, tells CNN Travel.

“This approach led us to a hybrid solution for the tower — no longer the traditional tower and podium but a composition of elements combining to form a holistic urban structure, connecting the ground to the sky.”

The complex features a balanced range of activities and infrastructure including office space, a retail complex, art and dining offerings, along with plenty of greenery and outdoor space.

A cascading, green open-air rooftop and terraces will take up about a third of the site area. The multi-story 700,000-square-feet shopping mall will offer an experiential retail space and world-class restaurants, says the developer.

Sustainability plays a major role in the design, too.

There will be a sky farm, natural ventilation, an automated smart waste sorting and storage system and a water-saving and rainwater retention management plan. It’ll also be home to the city’s first automatic bicycle parking bay.

A nod to Kai Tak Airport and Hong Kong’s past

The different design elements of the complex pay tribute to the site’s aviation past.

“During our research we were impressed by the images of the dramatic landings that took place at the former Kai Tak airport,” says Greenwood.

“In the design process, it was important to us to be respectful of and contribute to the preservation of the collective memory of many Hongkongers. The vast retail arcade space at Airside draws parallels to the typology of the airport terminal through its impressive scale and openness.”

The structure is filled with natural daylight whereas the exterior plazas and public rooftop gardens offer views over the city — “much like the visual impressions from the famous takeoff and landing experiences of the original airport.”

Nan Fung Development Limited, the local developer of the project and one of the largest privately-held conglomerates in Hong Kong, also loaned inspiration to the design.

Founded in the 1950s, it was the city’s largest yarn-spinning business. As a nod to this history, Snøhetta has blended in designs that acknowledge the company’s role in Hong Kong’s textile manufacturing as well as the city’s industrial past.

“[Some] examples of textile references are the weaved office lobby chandelier wrapping around the office lobby stone pleats, the fluted glass façade, whose panels in different radii are organized in a stylized drapery, or the stone pavers of the public plazas whose different tones form a crest like pattern that invites its users inside,” says Greenwood.

Airside will be located next to the new Kai Tak MTR metro station — where the former North Apron of the old airport was located.

Other highlights in the area include the Norman Foster-designed Kai Tak Cuisine Terminal and its rooftop park (already opened and in use), public facilities, residential buildings and commercial areas.

CNN’s Francesca Street contributed to this report.

(CNN) — With social distancing at forefront of everyone’s minds, having your own space on an airplane has never been so important.

But would you pay extra to spread out over a row of economy seats?

The idea is passengers traveling in economy can nab a row of three to four seats, and then stretch out across them, replicating the experience of a lie-flat business class bed. Travelers will be given a blanket, pillow and seat topper to maximize the comfort, and also offered priority boarding.

Those interested must purchase the upgrade at the airport, either during check-in or at the gate, for $260 on top of the price of their original ticket.

Innovative economy seat designs

O’Neill told CNN Travel in June that he reckoned the increased privacy the seat offered would be appealing to travelers in the wake of coronavirus, even though Zephyr Seat is just in its design stages at the moment.

(CNN) — How many times do you touch the cabin around you in an airplane when you fly? How about the airport? How many times do the people working there touch your belongings?

The answer today is, as a rule, “quite a lot.” But airlines, airports and the aviation industry want the answer in the near future to be “quite a bit less.”

It also includes not just touch-free but also “less-touch” and “fewer-touch” travel: both the need to touch physical things in the travel environment less and also fewer times during each interaction.

Making touchless cabins is very complex

“In the cabin, the most promising area is the lavatory,” explains Baron. “It is common knowledge in the cabin interiors industry that even before Covid, many passengers hesitated to use lavatories out of negative perception; in other words, having to touch dirty surfaces. We have seen incremental improvements over the past decade, mostly touchless faucets and toilet lids and flush buttons. Next will be soap dispensers and hand dryers, plus the doors and locks.”

Some of this is automated, such as infrared sensing faucets, but some of it is also redesigning physical parts of the experience, such as doors or trash bins you can open with your feet.

Of course, adding new features to the aircraft cabin can get complicated because there are many safety regulations.

Fortunately, some of this work is already under way.

The Independent Aircraft Modifier Alliance is a group of companies that carry out these kinds of modifications for airlines, which has for several years now been pushing for harmonization and clarification of the various national regulations.

“The technology is ready,” says IAMA Managing Director Nicole Noack. “Before Covid-19, the return on investment was the key challenge. But with the new normal, those technologies might become crucial to have passengers trust again in air travel.”

Noack cites electrical load testing, electromagnetic interference and general safety testing as the key safety certification elements that need to be overcome.

But there are other issues of technological equity — “techquity” if you will — to overcome, too. Videos of automatic soap dispensers not being engineered to detect hands with darker skin tone are numerous.

New solutions must also be accessible to the full range of travelers and be usable by people of various ages, sizes and levels of ability or disability. Airlines do not have a good track record on serving passengers with disabilities and mobility restrictions or who are in any other way outside the mainstream, so it’s even more vital that any new changes take the full range of passengers’ needs into account.

The touchless airport is arriving ahead of schedule

At the airport, touchless technology is speeding up.

“Airports have been quicker to adopt touchless travel than aircraft cabins,” says Round. “We are already seeing touchless security, and more and more processes are moving out of airport infrastructure and into the digital world thereby reducing the number of contact points in the airport.”

In implementation, this all ranges quite widely across your journey. One element is checking in online and keeping your boarding pass on your phone. Another is remote bag drop, either the first-generation tap-the-kiosk-screen versions or, increasingly, the newer scan-your-app-barcode versions.

Touchless boarding has been around for a while, although updating these systems for the Covid-19 distanced boarding processes has been complicated in places. Whether it’s local regulations or simply the fact that most airline IT involves getting numerous decades-old systems to work together, any new technology is complex to introduce.

At baggage claim, meanwhile, a Lufthansa spokesperson reveals that “we have just released a new self-service that in the rare case of delayed bag delivery, [the airline] pushes a text message to the respective passengers informing them that delivery is delayed. It saves time and — now using the new self-service to report the delayed bag and give the airline instructions where to deliver it — gives [passengers a] way to leave the airport without further queuing.”

The airline says it is also developing touchless self-service options for delayed or canceled flights. They include automatic voucher issuance, the use of the digital boarding pass as a meal voucher at the airport and even a direct push-message trial to select a hotel nearby in the event that unexpected overnight accommodation is required.

After arrival, and sometimes on departure, there’s touchless immigration scanning, too. Rather than handing over your documentation, you scan it and the gate opens, with either a staffer or an automated facial/biometric system verifying your identity if needed.

“These changes are increasing safety and efficiency at the same time as well as gathering vast swathes of data about passengers that enable the airlines and airports to personalize the travel experience to a much higher degree,” Round notes, explaining that this kind of biometric data is “starting to play a key part in rapidly getting people through airport security and check-in.”

There has previously been some pushback around gathering, processing and storing such valuable and potentially dangerous biometric data. The general problem is that if it’s hacked, you can change a password but not your face or fingerprint.

Will the “corona-normal” situation of handing over personal details for contact tracing reduce objections to the next generation of the touchless cabin?

On the ground, many people are now willing to hand over personal details for contact tracing or to scan QR codes for Covid-19 tests and contact apps into their biometric-scanning phones. That wider acceptance, previously in question, could well be what accelerates its use in aviation.

John Walton is an international transportation and aviation journalist based in France, specializing in airlines, commercial aircraft and the passenger experience.

(CNN) — For nearly half of the entire history of commercial aviation, long-haul flights have conjured up images of large, wide-bodied aircraft, with two aisles, up to 10 seats in every row, spacious overhead bins and, more recently, shiny on-demand tablet-style entertainment systems.

That’s in sharp contrast to smaller narrow-bodied aircraft, with their single aisles, six seats per row and, generally, less space and comfort.

But before the Boeing 747 started carrying passengers in 1970, narrow-bodies were the standard for long-haul air travel, although their definition of “long haul” wasn’t quite what we know today.

The Boeing 707s you might remember from that “Pan Am” TV show nearly 10 years ago, say, could barely make it from London or Paris to New York without needing to refuel, often at Gander in Newfoundland, although they were faster and quieter than anything seen before.

On the outside, these jets are more similar to what we’re flying on today — and will fly on tomorrow — than you might think. Even the shape of the nose and the size of the fuselage of Boeing’s 737 airplanes, the world’s best-selling aircraft, are taken directly from the 1950s Boeing 707.

On the inside, meanwhile, while he “never had the opportunity to fly on a 707,” aircraft interior designer Ben Orson, managing director of Orson Associates, tells CNN, “It’s clear that the new generation of single-aisle aircraft benefit from decades of interiors optimization, which has delivered significant improvements in terms of weight, environmental comfort factors — cabin pressure, lighting and so on — space efficiency across seating, linings and bins and lavatory and galley integration.”

That’s certainly a long and technical list, but it all means more space and more amenities for you, the passenger. And if passenger experience has come a long way, so have the airplanes — and their capabilities.

There are three planes in the latest generation of narrow-body aircraft, with the latest engines.

The first is Airbus’ A220, formerly the Bombardier CSeries, which is the smallest of the lot.

The second is Boeing’s 737 MAX, an update of its venerable 737, although its low-slung design means its engine size is constrained compared with the others, so it’s not truly a long-haul machine.

But the third is the real player: the Airbus A321XLR, the most recent member of the A321neo family, an updated version of Airbus’ short-haul workhorse with new internal fuel tanks.

The A321XLR can fly far as those early 707s and more than half again: up to 4,700 nautical miles, or around 10 hours — something like the distance from Florida to the UK, or from Beijing to France.

It’s a sea change and it harkens back to the start of the jet age in 1958, when the Boeing 707 first started flying — at nearly the speed of sound, across the oceans, landing to refuel every four or five hours.

In some ways, travel was very different back then

People dressed up, whether flying in first class or in coach. Luggage was checked into the hold, because overhead bins hadn’t been invented yet. Instead, there was the hat rack, a literal shelf above passengers’ heads for light items only.

The overhead bins of today are still a pain point for passengers, and it’s one that today’s aircraft manufacturers are working on.

“Once only possible with larger aircraft, a single aisle long haul will open a world of new routes with all the trappings of long-haul cabin comfort,” Airbus’ head of single-aisle marketing Antonio Da Costa explains to CNN. “On top of offering direct flights to the passengers’ final destination, the A321XLR’s new Airspace cabin is quieter and features a new airy design and larger hand luggage bins, easing boarding-deboarding.”

While today’s planes have on-demand, high-definition video and fast WiFi Internet, inflight entertainment has only been around since the 1960s, with the now-defunct TWA the first to introduce films for everyone on board, projected onto screens in each section of the aircraft.

Individual headsets — which were pneumatic, literally pushing sound through the air via tubes to passengers’ ears — were brought on board in the same decade, and lasted into the early 2000s on older aircraft. A common sight at the time was children leaning their heads against the armrest to hear the audio crackling tinnily from the sockets if their parents declined to pay to rent the headphones.

But in other ways, the experience was very recognizable

If yoga pants and neck pillows have replaced gabardine suits and expensive hats, the basic layout of the narrow-body passenger experience hasn’t changed all that much.

Up front, passengers on a 707 would have been seated two either side of the aisle, in big squashy recliner chairs that, depending on the airline, would recline a little or a lot.

That’s essentially what you see today unless you’re on a long-haul specific A321, 757 or 737 MAX, which have over the last decade moved from these recliners to convertible flatbed sleepers — usually still two-across, though.

In economy, the configuration was the same as we see today as well: three seats on either side of the aisle. They were a lot thicker and a fair bit more padded than now, but modern industrial design engineering is working hard on improving today’s seats.

Mark Hiller, chief executive of Recaro Aircraft Seating, which makes both short-haul and long-haul seats, explains that “when selecting the right products and features, the passenger seating experience on a A321XLR can be on the same level as on any wide-body aircraft. The given size of the fuselage allows for a more generous seating layout compared with other aircraft types and our RECARO seating solutions further improve this.”

That fuselage size point is another important one when thinking about today’s passenger experience versus yesterday’s.

Boeing’s 737 is essentially still the same cross-section as the 707, but the Airbus’ A321’s fuselage is a fair bit bigger, which means seats can be a full inch wider — 18 inches rather than 17 inches. Indeed, at a time when people are simply taller and broader in frame than they were 60-70 years ago, 18 inches is even wider than many long-haul aircraft seats, and a seat’s width is one of the most important factors in whether we think it’s comfortable or not.

As the 1950s and 1960s gave way to the 1970s and 1980s, more efficient aircraft replaced the original long-haul narrow-body jets, including the narrow-body Boeing 757 that today’s Airbus A321neo family is itself replacing in turn.

But key to the story of these aircraft is that their smaller size meant then — and means now — that you can fly nonstop to more destinations, especially if you live somewhere that isn’t a megahub like London, Atlanta or Dubai.

So even if you’re not persuaded by the idea that long-haul narrow-bodies can have the same seats as long-haul wide-bodies and be just as comfortable, if not more so, you now have the choice of a nonstop flight and cutting several hours off your journey — and that’s a comfort in and of itself.

Top image: The Boeing 707 Jet Stratoliner Number One under construction at Boeing’s Transport Division in Renton, Washington, circa 1958. (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

(CNN) — The number of travelers passing through airport security checkpoints in the United States reached its highest level since mid-March on Wednesday despite urging from federal health officials for Americans to spend Thanksgiving at home.

In a pandemic-era record, 1,070,967 people passed through security at America’s airports on the day before Thanksgiving. That number is just 40% of last year’s passenger volume on the same day, when 2,602,631 people were screened.

The TSA receives passenger information from the airlines as part of its screening responsibilities, and the data does not show widespread cancellations in recent days, TSA spokesman Andy Post said.

From September to October, the number of scheduled available seats departing US airports was down nearly 50% compared to the same timeframe last year. Due to increased demand, that number is only down 39% for the Thanksgiving holiday period, according to Airlines for America, a trade association that represents major North American airlines.

While Wednesday was busy, industry groups expect the Sunday after the holiday to be even busier.

The number of travelers passing through airport security amid the coronavirus surge is concerning, but many Americans are heeding the warnings from officials and health experts.

Sixty-one percent of Americans said they changed their Thanksgiving plans, according to a poll released on Tuesday by Axios-Ipsos. More surprising is that nearly one in 10 Americans that were polled say they do not plan to celebrate the holiday at all.

The US has posted over 100,000 new coronavirus cases for the 23rd consecutive day.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the percentage of available seats departing US airports. It is down 50% compared to the same timeframe last year.

CNN’s Marnie Hunter, Amanda Watts, Virginia Landmaid, Pete Muntean and Naomi Thomas contributed to this report.