Best:
Portland Ore
Small well organized and has a Powell’s Books
Vancouver BC
Awesomely well designed airport
LAX.
My home airport. I’ve flown in and out of here so many times I have the entire place dialed tight.
Worst:
Dulles hate that place 1/4 mile TSA lines
Newark
Best: Billy Bishop (Toronto Island) airport. A small airline (Porter) that puts customers first started using it for access to downtown Toronto, in contrast to the other carriers that did not treat passengers as well and that only flew to the international airport that was in the suburbs. It was the combination of a terrific location and a carrier that actually gave a shit.
Singapore’s Changi Airport routinely gets named the world’s best, and it pretty much deserves it. I always enjoy Changi.
Honolulu Airport, I love the way it smells. Smells like Hawaii.
Hong Kong’s old airport, the one that was in the heart of Kowloon, let you peer into condo units as you cam in to land.
The airport in Mae Hong Son, northern Thailand is right in the middle of town. I remember locals would use the runway as an exercise zone in the evenings.
Haven’t really been in too many bad airports, or maybe they just don’t bother me. Hanoi’s was probably the dirtiest I’ve seen. Managua was no great shakes. Changchun, China’s was pretty bland. Kathmandu may be the most bizarre, as you’re met by a wall of teeming masses outside who are not allowed inside. As soon as you walk out, they all want to take you in their taxis or to their hotels. It feels a little like an assault charge in Braveheart.
DTW is great to get around inside. Even the new North Terminal the opened a few years ago is a vast improvement. However I detest the egress, and the design is horrible. To get to the parking garage or shuttles, you have to go up several levels, cross a bridge, and then go back down. It was so much simpler (quicker!) when we could go right out the door and cross the street. Note that this isn’t the drop-off area street, and so it wasn’t dangerous to cars or pedestrians.
Hong Kong is excellent, as long as your plane lands at the correct terminal, and/or the airline wasn’t too cheap to pay for a jet bridge. If you land at the remote terminal and have less than an hour connection, it’s a pain in the butt to run to the train that connects them. If your airline doesn’t cough up for docking, though, then you’ll have to board a crowded shuttle bus which, once full and packed to the gills, will take you to the terminal. However once inside the main Hong Kong terminal, it’s very, very nice and well organized.
I learned to hate Houston when I flew regularly to Mexico. Often we docked in some remote Quonset-hut type of facility that lacked air conditioning and required a long walk to the main area. All but one restaurant was fast food, although the colored-vest people were able to direct me to a full service restaurant. Nice folks.
Guangzhou has a long walk between Chinese domestic and international, and the customs area is a madhouse. There are electric golf cart shuttles between domestic and international, but sometimes they fill up too fast and you have to wait for them to return, hopefully empty. Since there’s no sense of first-come-first-serve, you also have to hope that no one will cut in front of you when the cart returns.
For some reason I really like Bangkok. The organization/layout is sensible, and there are lots and lots of shops and restaurants. When on business class, though, sometimes the lounges are hard to find (depending on airline). Arrival is great, too, and I appreciate being able to buy a SIM card right after collecting my luggage.
JFK. Fuck JFK. This isn’t The Pit, but I reiterate my curse. Coming in from Shanghai (I think) and transferring to DTW on a Delta-sold ticket (partner arrival, Delta connection) I had to collect all of damned bags, leave the airport and take some crappy, slow, creaky pseudo-train piece of feces in the snow and cold to get to my domestic terminal.
Edit to add:
[quote=
Siam Sam]
Singapore’s Changi Airport routinely gets named the world’s best, and it pretty much deserves it.
[/quote]
Oh, yeah! I’ve only connected through there once. The butterfly conservatory was relaxing, and there are free children’s play areas, and free massage chairs. The shops accept China Union Pay, and it was one of the best connecting airports I’ve been through.
That reminds me, that was a connection on my first trip to India. Indian airports suck. Oh, God, do they suck. You know you’re arriving in a third-world country when you have to go through an Indian airport. I’ve been through Maderas/Chennai, Bangaluru, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Trichy. Mumbai presents a nice front until you have to transfer to domestic.
Oh, I have another airport I love, Panama. If you’re doing connecting flights, you don’t have to do customs (reason I dislike Miami), and they have lots of duty free shops and places to eat. Not as big or as interesting or as comfy as Atlanta, but miles ahead of Miami.
[quote=“Malthus, post:29, topic:722581”]
Worst, as in ‘most frightening’ - that must be the airstrip on the island of Saba. It’s the size of a postage stamp: the shortest commercial airstrip in the world. Plus, huge cliffs at each end mean that if you miss it or overshoot, you die.
Landing on it is a white-knuckle experience for passengers. 
Have you been to Sea-Tac recently? Last time I was there they’d spruced the place up quite a bit. The center part of the main terminal has been turned into a food court with a massive window overlooking the apron and runways. When I see this, “grungy” isn’t the first word that springs to mind.
Although, last time I was there, there was music playing; contemporary, electric violin. Also not what I would call grungy.
SEA Sea-Tac is pretty nice, yes.
Some of my good experiences include…
FWA Fort Wayne-Allen County Airport (Fort Wayne, IN), the last time I was there, had an interesting display on the women pilots of WWII.
KOA Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii is surrounded by huge lava fields. Driving away from the airport, surrounded by all the dark lava, it really felt like I was on the moon. And then to see the lava graffiti, no paint but bright white coral arranged on the black lava, was a treat. http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/North_America/United_States_of_America/Hawaii_State_of/Hawaii_Big_Island/Local_Customs-Hawaii_Big_Island-Lava_Grafitti-BR-1.html. Also at KOA one time I had the honor to meet and chat with the widow of Ellison Onizuka, one of the Space Shuttle Challenger astronauts. At the time I was also working at Onizuka Air Force Base in Sunnyvale, CA.
OGG Kahului on Maui is quaint and friendly. Easy to get in to and out of.
PVG Shanghai (Pudong International), you can take the world’s fastest commercial maglev train to and from it. If you fly to PVG I recommend it, it’s a neat and unique experience, and it’s pretty easy. There are taxis and the metro at the other end of the 20-mile line that only has two stations. Oh and it’s inexpesive too, less than US $10, IIRC. If you fly to PVG in the summertime, though, don’t breathe the air.
MKE Milwaukee, General Billy Mitchell Int’l Airport, has an interesting small museum on Mitchell’s contributions to flight.
MUC Munich (Flughafen München) is large and well organized. I love the German orderliness. I read somewhere that it is Europe’s first 5-star airport, whatever that means. Clean airport, too.
ARN Stockholm Arlanda Airport is also clean and orderly. It’s between Stockholm and Uppsala, about 25 miles from both cities.
IAH Houston TX, George Bush Intercontinental, the workers are very friendly there. I lost luggage once there and the United folks helped me a great deal. One lady even gave me her personal cell so I could later cut through the red tape and call her to see if my bag had arrived. Hmm, now that I think of it, maybe she was looking for a date! That was last year, and I can’t remember if she was hot, so that likely means she wasn’t. It was after a redeye so maybe I was tired.
ROC Rochester NY, when I was a young kid my Dad spotted Bill Cosby walking in the snow and wind in front of the airport. He asked me to get out of the car and ask for his autograph. Cosby was nice and he signed. It’s probably a good thing that I went and not my sister. Or my Mom.
BCN Barcelona-El Prat is huge. A zoo when it’s crowded. But I guess they all are.
ALB Albany NY, a special shoutout to my hometown airport, only because I have fond childhood memories of my Dad bringing us there as young kids and we’d park at the end of the runway and watch the planes take off and land.
Both of which are standard tracked electric trams. This isn’t North Haverbrook, after all. (BTW, there is a third line at ATL: MARTA. Also not a monorail.)
Yeah, that’s a good choice. I like flying out of there.
In addition, Billy Mitchell Field has the best damn bookstore I’ve ever seen in an airport. And better than most bookstores out of airports too! Staff can be quirky as hell, but if you love books . . .
IANAP, I have no idea if that would actually work - wouldn’t you be going too slowly, having just frantically braked to stop before you went over the edge? 
When taking off, that edge is your friend, allowing you to fall until you gain sufficient speed to fly! So it’s no braking, but rather full throttle ahead!!
This is especially true for Saba, where I believe most planes do go over the edge, lose altitude relative to the runway, then start flying.
Landing is a bit different, 'tis true.
Certainly it would be a help if you were speeding up to take off. I guess my question is whether a pilot who tried his or her hardest to land - only to run out of runway - could use that cliff to just throttle up, get in the air again, and circle around for another ‘try’ - or if they risk being too slow and plunging into the sea down below.
In any event, as a non-pilot passenger, I saw the runway when going in and I was all ‘it is too small. This is a joke, you can’t land a plane on that!’ Though the landing was of course without a problem - in the airport building (which was closed), you could see they were selling T-shirts that read something like “I survived landing at Saba”. Not many airports sell soveniers proclaiming how terrifying they are.
I’m going to Wichita, far from this opera for evermore…
I’m sure the new terminal was needed, but I’m kinda sad about the old one - but that’s because I’ve only flown into and out of Wichita once in the past 30 years, but did so many, many times between the late 1950s and early 1980s. So I’ve got fond memories of the old terminal from when it was in good shape.
We fly from BWI to Tampa and back frequently, since my wife’s family lives in central FL. We are fans of both TPA and BWI, but Tampa especially. Usually by the time we get to the luggage carousel, the bags from our flight are already showing up on the conveyer belt. And it’s not exactly a hike from the gate to baggage claim.
BWI has smaller restrooms than it really should; that’s the main complaint I have with it. Normally when you go into an airport restroom, there’ll be 10-12 urinals and 10-12 stalls. I’ve only come across one of those at BWI; all the rest have maybe 3-4 of each.
When we were flying back and forth between home and Russia while in the process of adopting the Firebug in 2009, we changed planes at JFK each time. God, what a dump. Good thing I bought a short-term membership to Delta’s SkyClub that covered the period we were doing our traveling.
Speaking of that set of trips, Sheremetyevo (SVO) International Airport in Moscow was a real pain in the neck for a furriner to navigate. Maybe it’s easier if you’re a native, but to get to your plane, you had to go through a lot of checkpoints - nearly a dozen, IIRC - with a lot of walking along the way. And it was kinda grungy, though not nearly as bad as JFK.
Both airports in Houston are pretty good.
Worst one I’ve ever been to: Balikpapan, Indonesia. Shudder.:eek:
After watching a vid of landing and taking off from Saba, I’m convinced that Saba is an aircraft carrier with grass planted on the deck.
I’m glad I didn’t see that before going there. Though admittedly, the pilot makes it look easy - the plane stops on a dime.
Another vote for Singapore as the best.
For worst, I think Kabul and Dulles are about tied, although now that I’ve signed up for Global Entry, Dulles isn’t as bad.