Living in limbo at airports
Finding passengers sleeping in an airport terminal is not unusual. Some people book flights that require them to remain overnight at the airport to catch flights, others, because they perhaps missed their connecting flight or when flights are cancelled owing to bad weather or delayed due to technical problems. Such setbacks may, at the very most, involve hanging around the airport in limbo for not more than a day or two. However, there are people who have managed to take up residence in terminals for weeks, months and even years.
Way back in 1986, 44-year old Fred Dilsner, a former accountant was found living at O’Hara Airport a year. This was the time homeless people began living in the airport, following the completion of the Chicago Transit Authority train link – which provided an easy and cheap daily commute. This issue has persisted into the 21st century.
Aditya Singh was arrested in January 2021 after he lived at Chicago O’Hara International Airport. He was able to do this by staying and sleeping in a secluded area and by using the many bathroom facilities in the terminal, whilst relying on the benevolence of other passengers to buy him food. The game was up after three months when airport staff asked to see his ID. His discovery and apprehension came about –right after passenger numbers dropped during the resurgence of COVID-19.
Singh is one of many individuals who have managed to stay undetected in airport terminals for months and in some cases, years. The most famous of all is Mehran Karimi Nasseri who made Charles de Gaulle Airport his home for 18 years and inspired the Spiellberg directed film “The Terminal” starring Tom Hanks as well as a French film “Lost in Transit” and an opera called “Flight”
Nasseri was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction, to an Iranian father and a British mother. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. When he returned, he said, he was imprisoned for protesting against the shah and expelled without a passport.
He first took up residence at the French airport in the summer of 1988, when British immigration officials turned him back from London. This was after he claimed that the papers granting him refugee credentials by the UNHCR in Belgium were in his briefcase which was stolen at a train station in Paris.
Arrested by the French police who couldn’t deport him anywhere because he had no official documents, he was later released and ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988. He stayed on after a court case ruled that French authorities couldn’t forcibly remove him from the airport and so began his 18 year legal stay in no man’s land. He left only in 2006, declining health required his hospitalization. Prior to his death in November 2022, he had returned to the airport on his own accord, and was staying in Terminal 2F when he suffered the heart attack that killed him.
Airports – especially the big ones are like mini-cities. They have shopping, accommodation, casual and fine dining, lounges, cinemas, games rooms, wellness centres, pharmacies, mass transportation, security – even places of worship. In addition, they provide water, bathrooms and shelter. With all these, by simply blending with the crowds, they are the perfect cover to avoid detection – especially at certain airports, which pre- pandemic handled 1.5 to 2.5 million passengers on any given day.
Arahoz Noorhem is a qualified educator who teaches English as a foreign language, a professional jazz pianist, music composer, bird watcher and an intrepid traveler.
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