IF YOU’VE BEEN a reader of mine for any length of time, you’re acquainted with my frustrations over airport noise. Things are comparatively quiet at the moment, with most airports conspicuously bereft of passengers, but in normal times it’s noise levels that serve up one of the biggest stress factors in the entire air travel experience: endless public address announcements, wailing babies, chattering TVs, and airport architecture seemingly designed to amplify, rather than quash, the collective racket of hundreds of people.

It’s those public address announcements that are the most aggravating culprit. Ninety percent of them are useless in the first place, and they’re typically delivered at a volume severe enough to shatter windows. And with all the various microphones and speakers targeting different sections of a terminal, it’s not uncommon to hear two or three announcements blaring at the same time.

Those few of any value are presented in such a tautological tangle as to be almost incomprehensible. Why say in ten words what you can say in a hundred? At JFK Airport there’s an announcement that loops around every five minutes or so. It declares: “All areas of the terminal have been designated as smoke-free.” I’ll begin by asking if there’s anyone alive who’d be daft enough to assume they’re permitted to smoke in a crowded terminal, an accommodation you’ll no longer find even at an airport in rural Pakistan. But listen, also, to the language. The entire announcement is unnecessary in the first place, but if you’re going to force it upon us, can you please do it using words your audience will understand? JFK is the ultimate melting pot, and I have a healthy suspicion that, to someone with limited (or no) English skills, a phrase like “designated as smoke-free” has about as much meaning as a bird call.

Then we have the security announcements. Did you know that my hometown airport, Boston-Logan, is home to a program called “SAFE,” or “Security Awareness For Everyone”? I know this because I’m told about it every five minutes while sitting at the gate. “If you see something, say something.” Important advice there. Meanwhile, “TSA has limited the items that may be carried through the security checkpoint,” we are told at Los Angeles International. “Passengers are advised to contact their air carrier.” The pointlessness of this counsel needs no explanation, but to further fray our nerves and damage our hearing, it plays after you’ve gone through security. //

Intensifying this bombardment are those infernal gate-side television monitors blaring CNN Airport Network. These yammering hellboxes are everywhere, and they cannot be turned off. There is no volume control, no power cord, no escape. Every gate has one, and they run twenty-four hours a day. //

Ironically, the actual loudest things at an airport — airplanes themselves — are almost never heard, buffered behind walls of glass and concrete. And it’s not until stepping aboard your plane that you can finally savor some silence. Or that’s the idea, anyway. Alas, the airplane cabin has contracted this same scourge. Nowadays, the first twenty minutes of every flight consist of nothing but talking: safety videos that never end, ignored directives on how to stow your luggage, and those manifesto-length promotional speeches that last from the time the landing gear retracts until thirty-thousand feet, often in multiple languages.