"Don't start up with your white zone shit again." San Francisco International Airport has enacted a new "quiet airport" plan to reduce unnecessary noise, including limiting the number of announcements broadcast across entire terminals. For example, boarding announcements will only be broadcast near relevant gates. From CNN:
Overall, reps for the airport say that more than 90 minutes of unnecessary announcements have been eliminated each day."[…]
While the quiet-please policy is new for SFO, the concept won't be unfamiliar to frequent travelers. Qatar's Hamad International Airport in Doha (HIA) maintains a policy of silence — except for the five Muslim calls to prayer per day. That is intended to give some of the 30 million passengers who pass through the airport in a typical year a sense of peace, whether they're leaving, transferring or coming home.
image: Håkan Dahlström (CC BY 2.0)
