"Variety" wrote: "Based on the novel by Arthur Hailey, over-produced by Ross Hunter with a cast of stars as long as a jet runway, and adapted and directed by George Seaton in a glossy, slick style, "Airport" is a handsome, often dramatically involving $10 million epitaph to a bygone brand of filmmaking" but added that the film "does not create suspense because the audience knows how it's going to end." Film critic Pauline Kael gave "Airport" one of its worst contemporary reviews, scornfully dismissing it as "bland entertainment of the old school." "There's no electricity in it", she wrote; "every stereotyped action is followed by a stereotyped reaction." Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four and faulted a predictable plot and characters that "talk in regulation B-movie clichés like no B-movie you've seen in ten years." Gene Siskel gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and reported that while the theater audience cheered at the climax, "it's a long and torturous road to the applause. Blocking the path are speeches that promote the industry, dialog that ranks among the silliest in memory, and a labored plot that tells you everything twice. Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" called it "an immensely silly film—and it will probably entertain people who no longer care very much about movies." Charles Champlin of the "Los Angeles Times" called the film "breath-taking in its celebration of anything which used to work when Hollywood was younger and we were all more innocent." Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" called it "a lousy movie" that was "utterly predictable." "The Monthly Film Bulletin" wrote, "Corny is really the only word for this unbelievably old-fashioned look at the modern phenomenon of an international airport: the one surprise is that the sweet old white-haired stowaway doesn't spring to the controls and bring the distressed aircraft down single-handed as Doris Day did once upon a time in analogous circumstances."