Airports

The airport runway is the most important mainstreet in any town.

— Norm Crabtree, former aviation director for the state of Ohio. This little quotation was told to me by a wonderful ERAU professor from Ohio, Henry R. Lehrer. I liked it a lot and included in my early aviation quotation lists, this website and the original book. From there it became the opening quote of the aviation movie One Six Right. How cool is that!

There is no other airport in the world which serves so many people and so many airplanes. This is an extraordinary airport… it could be classed as one of the wonders of the modern world.

— President John F. Kennedy, dedicating the Chicago O'Hare airport, 23 March 1963.

…Hell, which as every frequent traveler knows, is in Concourse D of O'Hare Airport.

— Dave Barry. There is no concourse D at O'Hare.

Terminals have always been, and probably always will be the 'bottle-necks' of transportation, whether of ground, water, or air systems.

— Harry H. Blee, US Aeronautics Branch, 1932.

The drooping grandmothers, the crying babies, the continuous, raucous, unintelligible squawk of the loudspeaker, the constant push and jostle of new arrivals … make bus terminals look like luxury … . Almost all U.S. airports are utterly barren of things to to. The dirty little lunch counters are always choked with permanent sitters staring at their indigestible food… . The traveler consigned to hours of tedious waiting can only clear a spot on the floor and sit on his baggage and, while oversmoking, drearily contemplate his sins.

&mdashFortune magazine, 1946.

That is the trouble with flying: We always have to return to airports. Thank of how much fun flying would be if we didn't have to return to airports.

— Henry Minizburg, Why I Hate Flying: Tales for the Tormented Traveler, 2001.

There's nothing like an airport for bringing you down to earth.

— Richard Gordon

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport.' Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.

— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988.

[London] Heathrow has been described as the only building site to have its own airport.

— anon.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

— Dennis Potter, in the Sunday Times, 4 June 1978.

The devil himself had probably redesigned Hell in the light of information he had gained from observing airport layouts.

— Anthony Price, The Memory Trap, 1989.

We recognised that just putting more flights and more passengers into the skies over southeast England wasn't worth the environmental costs we—re paying.

— Teresa Villiers, Great Britain—s minister of state for transport, regards the new government's decision to cancel the proposed third runway at Heathrow (and expansions at Gatwick and Stansted) due to global warming concerns. Interview in the New York Times, 1 July 2010