I’ve posted a shot of this gate before. It’s at the midpoint of Detroit’s McNamara Terminal: the main security checkpoint, where the train boards, where the tunnel leads to another terminal, where walkways begin. Where all the action is. So Delta makes a bit of a show here.
By noon, the gears of travel finally begin to grind. I head to the airport, but with a brief stop at the FedEx terminal to retrieve the new camera lens that had arrived this morning. With an uncharacteristic smoothness in my travel plans, I arrive at gate C8. I think – maybe – that I might even have brought everything I intended. It hasn’t happened yet in eight years, but without any glaring packing errors, I consider the possibility.
I love watching airports. Whether it’s planes moving around the ramps or cargo being loaded or the distant lights of incoming planes on approach to a runway, there’s so much to see. So many possibilities of people and places and machines. The aircraft in this picture had just arrived from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was headed to Miami. Minutes later, a pallet carrying a massive BMW sedan would be loaded into the belly of the plane parked at the next gate, followed by the suitcases of the people sitting above.