"Any airport anywhere immediately reflects the political system, economic status and cultural characteristics of the country where it is situated. During the supposedly swinging Sixties, both of the major London airports gave you a dauntingly accurate picture of Britain's true condition, with one delay leading to another, a permanent total breakdown of the information service supposedly telling you all about it, and food you would not have given to a dog. Zurich airport, on the other hand, was like a bank which had merged with a hospital in order to manufacture chocolates. At Milan and Rome, the radar operators went on strike during a fog, and the security police, all armed with automatic weapons, stood posing dramatically while Arab terrorists walked past them carrying dismantled bazookas in golf bags. Salzburg airport wad full of pictures of Herbert von Karajan, thus providing a useful introduction to a city which depends on him economically, derives its cultural justification from his mere existence, and bakes cakes in the shape of his head. And at Moscow's Sheremetsevo, the sheer number of Aeroflot jet airliners parked in lines told you something about the size of the country, the conspicuous lack of things to buy in the airport shops told you a lot about its economy, and the sullen vindictiveness with which the female customs inspectors went through the luggage of their compatriots returning from abroad told you all you needed to know about how fairly the shares had been dealt out."
"Nobody with a proper appreciation of the Boeing 747's looks will ever call it a Jumbo. The 747 is so suavely proportioned that it doesn't even look very big, except when it happens to taxi past its ancestor, the 707, whereupon you feel that a mackerel has given birth to a mako shark.
Loved by pilots for its handling qualities and seemingly infinite reserves of getaway, the 747 flies like a fighter and at first glance even looks like one. In fact it looks a lot like the old F-86 Sabre, with its flight deck bulge perched right forward like a Sabre's bubble canopy and the same proud angle to its tail feathers. On the ground the 747 is perhaps a bit fussy underneath, like a house being moved around on a lot of roller skates, but when it gets into the air, cleans itself up, and pours on the 100,000 horsepower of its turbofans, there is nothing less awkward or lovelier aloft. Unless you had been told, you would never think of it as having 400 people on board. It looks as if there is only one man in there, having the time of his life."
Clive James, Flying Visits
