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I was just hanging out on the balcony last night, and I looked out at the horizon and took these shots.

In them, you can see 4-5 airplanes in the horizon, all queued up to land at the Las Vegas McCarran International Airport … the 6^th busiest airport in the entire world based on the raw number of takeoffs and landings.

It is the 15^th busiest by total passenger volume.

Either way, the numbers are quite impressive for a psuedo-city of our modest size.

It’s kind of cool to sit here and watch the traffic.

Even as I type this, planes are taking off over my head, and I have to bump up the volume on my iTunes speakers every minute or so … but it’s something that I have gotten used to, and coordinating my volume adjustments are almost second nature and instinctual at this point.

Even though I can sit here and watch planes takeoff and land roughly every 45 seconds … traffic at McCarran airport is still down significantly over last year.

14% to be exact.

September of 2008 saw the 11^th straight monthly decline in air traffic to Las Vegas.

Fewer and fewer people are flying into town every month.

The irony to this statistic is that, until recently, Las Vegas intended to build a second airport about 20 miles southwest of the city near Jean, NV … in order to relieve overcrowding at McCarran. My guess is that the status of that project is currently on hold for a little while.

Overcrowding is solving itself at the moment.

I’m not entirely sure why anyone would want to fly to Jean, NV in the first place, and then drive half an hour into Vegas.

It defeats the purpose of our current setup.

The primary draw of our airport is its incredibly close proximity to The Strip. The airport is literally on The Strip. If you are staying at the Mandalay Bay or Tropicana, you can practically wave to the passengers as they zip by your window.

The airport is so close to The Strip, the projects have to get clearance from the FAA before building over certain heights. Supposedly, this restriction is what helped kill the world’s second largest tower …  but there were many other factors at play as well.

In addition to its overall convenience, if you are landing on runway 19L or 19R, you are afforded one of the best views of the Las Vegas Strip.

As a matter of fact, this is a video that I happened to take myself while landing on Runway 19R:

As you can see, the view of the Vegas Strip is unparalleled.

In the interest of fairness, the view from any other runway completely sucks.

A few days before I recorded the landing video, I recorded the takeoff video:

As you can clearly see from the airplane … aside from the Las Vegas Strip, there is nothing in Las Vegas.

Besides dirt and walls.

McCarran remains, however, my favorite airport in the world. The TSA lines are a little friendlier than average, there is free wi-fi in the terminals, travel time to and from the airport is fast, and cab fares are relatively cheap to the central city.

And of course … the video poker and slot machines. I’m sorry, but having these video machines in an airport is just cool as hell. It makes the airport itself feel like a giant casino … which for the most part, it is.

Will my flight be on time? Will my luggage arrive? Will the TSA guy stick his hand up my ass to make an example out of me … or worse, will he stick his hand up the ass of my 80 year old mother to make sure she isn’t Al Queda?

The whole airport experience is a gamble, but at least at McCarran, you have other games to play besides Flight-Delay Bingo.

McCarran is about a $10 cab ride from my home, and I never have to think twice about parking. It’s door-to-door service for less than what it would cost most people to park in the remote lots.

As a matter of fact, the proximity to McCarran is another reason I choose to live where I do. I need to have the security of knowing that I can book a seat online, call a cab, and be on my way out of this place within an hour.

Las Vegas is an island. We are surrounded by sand instead of water, but we are an island nonetheless.

This place isn’t like the northeast where you can just hop a train and be in a completely different big city in 45 minutes. When I lived in D.C. and New York, I used to take day trips to Philadelphia and Baltimore all the time. I would head north to Boston on a whim. The choices of destinations just a few hours away were literally unlimited.

Not here.

Las Vegas is spooky in its isolation, and it took some getting used to. It’s L.A. or nothing, and even to Los Angeles, it’s a 4 hour drive via a single 4 lane highway through desolate, isolated areas completely devoid of human population.

And let’s face it. Los Angeles isn’t really a city either. It’s the world’s largest 7-11.

Strip mall, strip mall, taco stand, strip mall …

This being the case, McCarran is my only lifeline to real cities.

Looking out of my window, and seeing the planes takeoff and land directly over my head is one of the only things that gives me comfort that I can return to civilization at a moment’s notice.

I never complain about the noise. The jets screaming over my head is a very comforting sound to me, because I am reminded every 60 seconds that the lifeline exists.

And if you are the slightest bit freaked out about living in a remote psuedo-city like Las Vegas, that lifeline makes all the difference to your sanity.

My proximity to the airport is of great psychological comfort to me.

As much as I hate air travel, and as much as I detest the airline industry and its abhorrent business practices … if they ever moved our airport away from The Strip, I would run screaming from this city the very next day.

Long live McCarran Airport … my personal security blanket.

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