Photograph by John E. McDonald
An airport is all about suspension: of time, of geography, of air. It strips down routine and identity and subjects people to displacement as they wait, or rush, to get from one place to the next, becoming another passenger in a sea of hundreds, thousands, or—in Atlanta’s case—hundreds of thousands. At one gate, a middle-aged woman stretches like a crane into a lunge on a yoga mat with the sunrise behind her. Across the hall, a mother cries. Her teenage son has an IV in his arm and is in a wheelchair being pushed by a firefighter toward the exit. This is the balance the airport grapples with daily: one side meditative and hopeful, the other dreadful and disorienting.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the city’s place of transition, where travelers bring their joy and pain together for formative experiences. The busiest and most efficient airport in the world is also where most people, Americans or otherwise, interact with Atlanta. In form and function, the airport resembles Atlanta, in all of its oddities, illusions, and aspirations, and travelers see the city for what it is.
The big picture is squeezed under a plastic dome inside the airport. Near where arriving passengers get off the escalator on their way to baggage claim is an encased diorama. The huge lit canopies that cover the airport have been shrunk to a foot and look like lungs that in real life breathe over 286,000 passengers and 63,000 employees in the domestic terminal. The airport miniaturized also helps one notice the mirage that is the “North” and “South” terminals: Both feed into the same massive space.
Among the miniature cars, streetlamps, AC units, and canopies, there is a fortune cookie scroll, improbably adrift inside the sealed plastic dome that surrounds the diorama. You can’t read the fortune, but you can see “Today’s lucky numbers for the lucky one: 39, 37, 4, 48, 41, 47.”
It’s always a lucky day: There are two Georgia Lottery kiosks close by. The one in the North Terminal is 45 steps away; the other, in the South Terminal, is 273. According to the cashier in the north one, who asked not to be named, at least one person a day plays those numbers. These Georgia Lottery kiosks are the best ticket sellers in the entire state, and when Georgia’s Powerball jackpot reaches more than a billion dollars, the cashier sees travelers who fly to Atlanta just to play the lottery in the airport.
The entire domestic terminal is the beating heart of Atlanta and mimics the city’s reputation for being without rhyme or reason. The airport’s MARTA station is conveniently placed in the terminal so Atlantans can come and go from the airport easily, for $2.50. There’s a room for unclaimed luggage in the South Terminal called the “the Atlanta Room,” but that moniker stands for “nothing,” according to its stationed employee. Inside is oversized, checked luggage left or forgotten: strollers, tool kits, golf clubs, rolled canvas paintings, a 40-inch flatscreen TV, and a large bundle of firewood.
There’s a mailbox in the North Terminal tattooed in stickers from around the world. It’s mostly used by employees as a post office to send both letters to family and government forms. Behind the mailbox is the convenience store Piedmont Park TravelMart, which sells zero merchandise related to the park.
At the arrivals screen, people pop up from the Plane Train dressed, maybe, in the merch of where they came from: a sweater from Mallorca, a Savannah Bananas shirt, an Inter Miami jersey, a hat bedazzled with “Paris.” Nobody can know for sure, though, where someone arrived from or where they’ll end up.
On the upper level is a lost and found that regularly has a line. There’s also the Interfaith Chapel, which has 10 chairs and literature from every major world religion. On a Wednesday afternoon, a Catholic woman kneels with a rosary, praying. In the eastern corner, a Muslim woman on a mat wears a hijab and bows toward Mecca. A rabbi in leather wrappings sits in the other corner sifting through a prayer book. Someone in the middle of the floor has parted a couple chairs and sits meditating.
The regular airport chaplain is Blair Walker, a Christian minister. He works 9 to 5 during the week, and 35 volunteer chaplains from various faiths are in and out. They are instructed to serve as spiritual rather than religious guides and to never bring up their own faith unless asked. Over a year, airport chaplains serve 7,000 volunteer hours and make more than 25,000 connections with passengers, or 68 per day. A few of those connections are recurring with airport employees, but many are fleeting, with travelers. Sometimes the chaplains stay in the chapels (the domestic terminal, Concourse E, and Concourse F), but they also venture out on the terminal floor to assist passengers with where to go, or as Rabbi Yossi Lew likes to say, “to see what appointments God has for today.”
A memory from Labor Day last year sticks with Walker. He was on the terminal floor and saw a mother holding a baby in her right arm, a duffel bag in her left, and another baby in a luggage cart basket. He asked her if he could help her with her luggage, and she handed him a baby.
As they walked toward security, the woman told Walker that she had left her abusive husband that day. A local church had bought her a flight, a police officer had driven her to the airport, and in one hour, she would board a flight to Las Vegas to live with her parents. Walker helped her through security, and she left for her gate. “That was it,” he said. “I will never know if she’s safe, and I just have to hope everything’s worked out. That’s the hard thing, you know. Sometimes we don’t know how someone’s story will end.”
• • •
Atlanta’s airport tries its best to look like a city. It’s even fit with a town square, a large open hall where the terminals meet, north of security, called the Atrium. There’s a rarely appreciated clock tower at its center.
When the clock strikes midnight, the Atrium shuts off its lights, but the rest of the airport is bright and restless. Passengers race off the Plane Train to get home as soon as possible. At the baggage claim, a mother argues with airline customer service about their family’s missed connection. She hasn’t told her three children yet that they will sleep there tonight. Police, on mountain bikes, check on sleeping travelers to see if they are in fact traveling and not making the airport their bed for the night. The cleaning staff are just starting their days. A man rides a floor scrubber and whistles while he wipes away the mess.
At 1 a.m., the lights at the baggage claim are still bright, and the only place to get rest in the terminal is the Atrium. Passengers sleep on the benches underneath the clock tower and on the floor. This year’s summer afternoon thunderstorms have caused more delays and cancellations than normal.
Two a.m. is the quietest time at the airport. Passengers are resigned to their fates and go horizontal to sleep. One of the only other places to get a good night’s sleep besides the Atrium is between Plane Train stops underneath Concourse A and B: the Flight Paths exhibit by Steve Waldeck. The 450-foot stretch simulates taking a walk through a dark jungle, with leaves on the ceiling illuminated by green and blue lights. There are sounds of rain showers and birds chirping. During the CrowdStrike outage last year, when 5,000 flights were canceled over three days because of a faulty computer update, passengers scrambled for spots on the jungle floor to find sleep in the 24/7 airport.
At 3 a.m., an insomniac rolls through the Atrium on a skateboard. A Brazilian dance crew called the Cybernetikos have made camp at a beach display in the Atrium called “ATL Skypointe Summer Vibes.” They are traveling back from the World Hip Hop Dance Championship Semifinals in Phoenix, Arizona, and await their connecting flight this morning to Rio de Janeiro. Some of the dancers sleep on sweatshirts as pillows; one teenager has over-the-ear headphones on and slowly moves his feet, dancing to hip-hop on the waxed floor.
At 4 a.m., passengers begin to arrive for the earliest flights. Everyone tries to stay awake now. In the bathroom, a teenager is freestyle rapping next to a businessman in a suit brushing his teeth at the sinks. Near arrivals, the janitorial staff push their carts back to storage, marking the end of their day. They’ve cleaned every concourse—all 6.8 million square feet—and trade war stories: A passenger threw up several times at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Concourse B; a janitor accidentally left a trail of cleaning solution; a mop broke, twice.
At 5 a.m., the airport bar at Grindhouse Killer Burgers is already full. A playlist of smooth and crooning R&B plays over the speakers. At the bar, people are drinking vodka sodas, double-shot screwdrivers, hot coffees with Bailey’s, and mimosas and eating burgers.
By 6 a.m., the airport is stretched awake. Every restaurant and store has opened, and the concourses are so busy that you couldn’t tell the difference between now and 6 p.m.
• • •
Past security, the veins and arteries of the airport are the Plane Trains—11 vessels in total with four cars each, operating on a three-mile loop track, arriving to a stop every two minutes. They are mostly automated, but two controllers are always on duty to clear anyone clogging the doors or to fix the train’s electric engine under the handicap seating.
The warm voice of Ryan Cameron introduces each stop. Cameron is an Atlanta radio mainstay on Majic 107.5. Ten years ago, he was sweating, crammed on the train, and thought, C as in Coca-Cola. He first pitched the idea of Atlanta-themed stops to the mayor Kasim Reed. He recorded for the Plane Train last year. He was told by airport producers to sound like a smile. His voice rings in the ears of the more than 200,000 people who use the plane train every day, including himself.
Photograph by John E. McDonald
Last week, when he was flying to Washington, D.C., he had a gate change from Concourse T to D. He rushed to the Plane Train and heard his own voice, calm and collective as ever: “B as in Burgers and Beverages, C as in Charlie, D as in David.” He didn’t say anything, but a passenger kept looking at him and smiling as each announcement rang through the train. Cameron gave him a thumbs up to let him know the voice was his. “I heard myself so loudly the whole way,” he said. “It was horrible.”
The concourses—T, A, B, C, D, E, and F—extend out like ribs, with about a fifth of a mile in between each one, and the Plane Train tunnels beneath, connecting them. Most of the walls and some of the ceilings below have displays of art. Along with the jungle of Flights Paths, there are 20 stone sculptures from Zimbabwe in between Concourse A and T. There’s A Walk Through Atlanta History from Concourse B to C. That exhibition has 400 feet of five panels divided by nine time periods—some long, such as Native Lands (11,000 BCE to 1540), others shorter, such as Global Gateway (1973–present), and all sprinkled with words such as forward, pioneering, and growth.
When Evan Bogan has delays, he goes down to the tunnels to get a good mile of steps in and look at the art. Bogan is a pilot going on 25 years for Delta, and the difference the art makes, he says, is striking. Take Concourse D to E, for example. There is one lenticular display, a photo of a boy fixing his tie and then straightening his jacket as he sits on a rock among the stars. The rest of the hallway is blank and looks like corporate dread.
The concourses themselves are a weird whiplash of sensibility and commerce. Steps off the escalator in Concourse E, there’s a chapel and a Martin Luther King Jr. exhibition with sermons that King wrote, the pen he wrote them with, and the robes he wore to deliver them. Beside the exhibit, a technology store sells chargers way above market price, and Subway loudly plays “No Lie” by Sean Paul and Dua Lipa that reminds you not to dwell too much on the past:
It’s gonna be lit tonight
No lie-e-e-e
In all, there are 393 concession outlets: 163 food and beverage locations, 113 retail and convenience outlets, and 83 service stores, among them the dueling shoe shiners, Master Shine in Concourse A and Final Touch Shoes in Concourse B. They vie for the airport’s contract every 10 years. In 2016, they split it. According to Nicole, who usually works at a Boar’s Head kiosk, concession positions rotate, so she could be at Boar’s Head one day and Baja’s Fresh Express the next.
Airport stores squeeze the local concept dry. There are “bookstores” randomly named after something Atlanta, including Midtown Magazines, Buckhead Books, Piedmont Park TravelMart; newspaper convenience stores Atlanta Daily World, CNN International, Atlanta Business Chronicle, ATL Today, Southern Living News; and Southern buzzword restaurants such as the Pecan Bistro, the Pecan, One Flew South.
• • •
On the tarmac, the airport is perhaps not what one would consider the usual dysfunction of Atlanta, in that its operation is one of the most well-oiled machines in the world. There are 197 gates, 157 domestic and 40 international, that take in more than 2,500 arrivals and departures daily. That’s almost two flights a minute. In total, there are 5.2 million seats on those planes, which would fill Mercedes-Benz Stadium 73 times a day. In 2024, Atlanta’s departures and arrivals numbered 796,224, with 108.1 million passengers—again making it the busiest airport in the world.
“I feel like they got lucky and designed the most efficient airport ever,” says Josh Gilmartin, an airside operations manager, which means that he oversees the airfield to prevent any problems. “The two airports, domestic and international, share a gate area, with concourses accessible from both sides, so we can land an aircraft at the farthest runway and park at the farthest gate in under 10 minutes in ideal conditions, from wheels on pavement to the jet bridge going up. You’re not going to get that in Denver, Dallas, and definitely not Chicago. They just weren’t designed like ATL.
“And kudos to the designers for the runways. Because of the landscape and the fact there isn’t a second airport, we can move airplanes. All five run parallel east-west so that planes can take off and land one after another, all in a straight line. As simple as that sounds, no cities like us have this, and we can operate over 250 aircraft in an hour, more than anywhere else in the world, and we don’t even have the gate capacity to do that.”
The organized chaos is managed by 47 people in Air Traffic Control, which sits in the tallest control tower in North America, at 398 feet. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Atlanta controllers typically simultaneously handle 5 to 10 aircraft that are landing and taking off. For those directing aircraft on the ground, that number can jump to 15 to 20.
Like any operation, though, things go wrong. In early August, two planes clipped wings in the gate area. In January, a Delta plane aborted a snowy takeoff after one of its engines caught fire. Last September, the wingtip of a Delta plane clipped the tail of an Endeavor flight at a taxiway intersection.
Photograph by John E. McDonald
It’s Gilmartin’s job to anticipate. Every night around midnight and 4 a.m., he and his crew inspect the runways and taxiway to make sure signage is clear and to remove debris. Usually, the junk on the runway is rocks, but Gilmartin has also found boxes of prophylactics and tampons out there. Sometimes a pet will chew through its cage and escape the cargo storage after arriving in Atlanta, and he’ll chase it. In 2022, the airport received a surprise transport of thousands of bees, and local apiarists were called to capture them after the bees fled.
Sometimes, people jump or cut through the fence around the airport. In the middle of the night last July, a man with a history of schizophrenia cut the fence on the south side of the airport and was caught lying down in the grass next to runway. Two years ago, a man stole a Delta vehicle, walked into an aircraft in the southwest hangar, stole another vehicle, and drove straight across the airfield. Gilmartin and police finally cornered him in a tunnel on the south side of the airfield.
• • •
To get a good view of the airfield, the operations crew sets up on Stogner Hill, the only real elevated surface at the airport, in the southeast section of the flight hub, near I-75 and I-285. On a clear day, you can see the downtown skyline. It was originally Radar Hill, for its eponymous instruments that sit on top, but was renamed in 2016. James Stogner, who died in 2015, was an assistant general manager at Hartsfield-Jackson for 42 years. Legend has it that he went up on Radar Hill for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to watch airplanes. Today, there’s a small plaque at the top dedicated to him, with a couple of flower beds.
On Stogner Hill, everywhere you look there is movement. A plane arriving from Columbia, South Carolina, crisscrosses runways and taxiways as a cargo plane leaves for Luxembourg. As it takes off, the grass next to the runway bends with the wind. Not many people associate airports with grass, but the FAA requires every airport to have lots of it. Grass helps stabilize air currents and can soften the damage of a landing gone wrong. It’s also important to maintain the airport lawns: Any weeds or flowers would attract bugs and, in turn, birds. Any animal life could become roadkill or, worse, end up in a turbine.
Gilmartin inspects the grass every day to make sure it’s at the FAA-required height with zero major wildlife. The airport also has two full-time wildlife biologists to advise on such questions as what type of grass to use and what to do in situations like a drought. They are trying to patch a problem now, caused by the flow of the Flint River through the south side of the tarmac. The odd deer or coyote sometimes follows the river through a drain and ends up on runways, halting planes. The airport is building concrete fencing along the river to discourage animals from climbing up to the airfield.
Every morning, Gilmartin checks the weather. The smallest thunderstorm or change in the winds can flip his day on its head, literally. If the wind switches, the airport also turns around, and controllers change the direction of how departures and arrivals use the runways. This year’s snow and ice caused difficulties: There were instances of aborted takeoffs when aircraft were sliding too much. Gilmartin’s team are more prepared for snow and ice next year to help with safe takeoffs.
Everything and everyone on the tarmac has a purpose, from painted lines and bollards directing plane traffic to bag throwers and the wing walkers who direct planes in backing up from the gate. For the staff outside, there are moments of standstill, so they pass the time by flipping cones or playing basketball on the hoop outside the fire station. Then comes an arrival, and everyone is back in motion. Time fluctuates, but the airport is never silent. The drowning hum and roar of jet engines in Atlanta is constant.
“Airports are a gigantic game of Tetris, of making the pieces fit so that things run smoothly,” Gilmartin says. “I like to think of ATL as a big song and dance, and operations, figuratively, go where the wind is blowing.”
When he’s flying with family and not on the job, Bogan, the pilot who takes art walks, likes to be a passenger. He gets to the airport early to reach his concourse, have enough time to get a coffee, and relax. When he’s at his concourse, he walks to the very end, where there are usually floor-to-ceiling windows. They overlook the runways.
A couple weeks ago, with his son, Bogan walked to the north end of Concourse T, a new expansion, to check out the view. “You get a perfect picture of what the airport is all about,” he says. “When all the stress of security and getting there is over, I can just hang out and watch airplanes.”
This article appears in our October 2025 issue.
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