It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strangeamps. Today, air travel.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, commercial planes were hijacked virtually every week.

And I just looked down and he pulled up a shotgun and put it in my stomach and said,

and tell the captain we're going to Cuba. You are now free to move about the country.

Oh, big old, jetterliner, don't carry me too far away.

One of the great pleasures of airports is that you're allowed to stare at people while pretending to me be a leap reading your newspaper.

Gonna go out to the arrivals gate as the airport has sit there all day.

Watch people reuniting, public confection starts exciting and even makes airports okay.

And today LAX is hopelessly trapped, surrounded by offices and Inglewood and a massive oil refinery on the southern edge, to the point where you can't expand.

Pack up, let's fly away.

Air travel has lost a lot of its romance and glamour since Frank Sinatra first sang,

Come Fly With Me. Today, we shuffle through security lines in our socks with our little plastic bags of liquids and gels.

In this hour, what modern air travel tells us about ourselves,

from the Aerotropolis City of the Future to the Golden Age of Hijacking. But first, can you imagine spending a week at an airport by choice? Alain de Botton actually did that, not because he was

terminally delayed, but because

Heathrow Airport invited him to become their first ever writer in residence. He described the

experience in a book called A Week at the Airport. The thing about an airport is it's all there,

all the themes of modernity, speed, interconnectedness, danger, pollution, beauty, efficiency, masses, mass society, loads of people,

consumerism. It's all there. It's all at the airport. If you were taking a Martian around the

world, you had only a few destinations and you wanted to show the Martian what it was like in the

modern world, you'd probably take them to an airport. It's a quintessential site of the modern world in all its horror and beauty. And I, for various reasons,

I can't even understand myself, I'm powerfully drawn to airports. I know many of them are

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