20th Century Waiting Rooms

AIRPORT by Arthur Hailey. 440 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Rebecca West once observed that "the railroad stations are the cathedrals of America." She was referring to the architecture--and romance--of another era, and it seems unlikely that she would accord the same accolade to that waiting room of the mid-20th century, the nervous, noisy jetport. For travelers in a hurry, it is all too often a place for enforced contemplation, while airlines catch up with their weather-beaten schedules. Novelist Hailey gives airports his familiar Hotel treatment, and the result may permanently ground all his readers.

In the space of a single night at the mythical Lincoln International Airport, nearly every imaginable man, machine or function goes wrong. One of the worst snowstorms in history has been raging over the airport for three days. The longest and widest runway is blocked by a mired Boeing 707. A traffic controller is suicidally depressed. And a Rome-bound flight lifts off with a man carrying a bomb in his briefcase. How Airport Manager Mel Bakersfeld and a score of other characters cope provides the suspense of this obvious but well-programmed novel. Among the nuggets Hailey might better have left unreported is a chillingly explicit vignette on How to Build a Bomb with materials available in hardware stores for "less than five dollars."

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