University lecturer to live in airport for 1 year for £40,000

A lecturer working at a university has sparked a furore for spending a year living in an airport terminal funded for by the taxpayer.

Dr Damian O’Doherty, 42, is at Manchester Airport spending about 18 hours a day there for the next year, watching passengers’ and employees’ habits.

However, the £40,000 project, funded by Lord Mandelson’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, has been heavily criticised as a waste of taxpayers’ money.

A spokesman for the TaxPayers’ Alliance pointed described the Government as ‘out of touch’ with the views of taxpayers.

The spokesman continued by saying that if the department wanted to find out how people interact in an airport, all they needed to do was to rent Tom Hank’s film ‘The Terminal’.

Dr O’Doherty, already nicknamed The Termianl Man, in reference to the 2004 film about a man who lived in an airport terminal who was refused entry into the US.

The research project is designed to understand how airports affect people with a view to making their environment a better place to live and work.

However, passengers departing and arriving yesterday said they were confused by the study, with one describing it a weird thing to research, with another traveller saying that the research was ‘daft’.

Working as a lecturer at the Manchester Business School, Dr O’Doherty has said that he has been researching airports for the past five years and just believed this would be an opportunity to experience airport life for himself