The AirTrain fare is $5.00 charged on a regular New York City subway and bus MetroCard. The turnstiles were really, really wide accommodating travelers with baggage. I arrived at Kennedy Airport at 12:45 pm; just two hours after boarding the first train. In the picture I (unintentionally) caught two AirTrains about to pass each other.
At the airport I used my passport to self-check-in, went through the full-body scanner (feet and hands at the indicated locations), and sent my carry-on through the X-ray scanner. There was also a tray of sandwiches being X-rayed. Were the sandwiches being scanned or heated? I passed some fancy new baggage scanning machines that were not being used at the time, the Reveal CT-80. Nearby was a TSA employee. Our conversation went like this.
"If I took a picture of this machine would I be in violation of Federal law?"
"Yes, you would."
"Then I won't."
However, the manufacturer's website has a picture of the dual-energy computer tomography X-ray scanner.
My flight to Madrid was Delta 126; it was also Air France 3669. The plane was a Boeing 767-400ER with 42 Business Elite seats in a 2-2-2 arrangement and, where I was sitting, 200 Economy seats in a 2-3-2 arrangement. The seat back in front of me had a touch screen display with a plethora of viewing options: Movies, HBO, TV, Music, Games, My Flight, and Info. My Flight displayed information that included: a moving map with the current plane's position indicated by an airplane symbol, local time at the origin, local time at the destination, distance traveled, time to destination, altitude (32917 feet), ground speed (559 mph), tail wind (35 mph), and outside air temperature (-52 °F). [Good. The degree symbol. I've included my first special character. I'm waiting for an opportunity to include a €.] For dinner we had a choice of chicken or pasta. After I informed a flight attendant that my chicken was beef, she responded, "I was just going by the printed menu. Sometimes they change it. I though the chicken looked a little dark."
Sunday, May 15 was an extra travel day intended to give my internal body clock additional time to adjust to losing six hours. The day was spent figuring out where I had to go the next day at the Madrid Airport for my flight to Seville, changing some dollars to euros, and sitting out in the bright sunlight.
The Madrid Airport is so huge that the signs indicating the directions to walk toward gates give estimated walking times. The longest one that I saw was for gates beginning with the letter U, 23 minutes.
I stayed at a hotel near the airport.
