Airport row leaving city humiliated

PUT yourself in a tourist’s shoes for one minute. Or someone leaving the city after a business trip.

Just as you’re leaving the city, you get to experience a few unique last impressions.

On the drive to the airport, you look left and see the Salvation Army’s collection of rehab houses for recovering drug addicts, and as you look right you get to see the barbed wire fences caging in youth criminals at Cleveland Detention Centre.

If your flight hasn’t been cancelled, you squeeze yourself through the tiny airport security area and if you’re delayed, which is likely, you can enjoy the extensive offering of two food and beverage outlets.

With a little luck, you’ll even find a spot to sit in the undersized departure lounge. You’ll need to dodge the new seats the airport has put in the middle of a thoroughfare if you want to go to the toilets or the Qantas lounge.

Finally, when the time comes to board, you make your way up the escalator to a whole new type of torture on the airport’s mezzanine.

Squashed and sweating, somehow you manoeuvre your way onto a plane.

If you’re really lucky, you’re heading to Sydney and if you haven’t managed to jag a spot on the one middle- of- theday direct flight, you’ll touch down in about six hours after a joyous pit stop in Brisbane.

Thank you for visiting Townsville. Please call again.

The airport has reported record passenger numbers in recent weeks. How awful that more people than ever before are passing through this abomination and likely vowing never to do so again.

We talk about wanting to be a tourist centre yet this is what we offer visitors for first and last impressions. It’s not good enough.

That airport is a total embarrassment to our city.