Sure I have my share or more of aircraft/airport encoutners, won't go into details for lack of space.

Most memorable while not an airport was in November last year, the seventh I think, whaever the day is the Americans amongst you do that voting thing (while I live here now, I'm still an Aussie, so I pretty much ignored the election until it turned into the mess that it did).

After a day of meetings around New York I jumped a taxi back to my hotel, the cab driver was clearly upset by this and tried to convince me not to go to that particular establishment. Sure enough when we started to get close traffic was a mess, nothing was moving etc etc...

Finally get close enough to walk to the hotel, arrive to find a police//media/fire dept blitz going on... two forms of identification to get past security to get into the hotel...

So Hillary and Bill are there preparing to give a victory speech, the hotel is packed full fo democratic faithfull all going berserk as it is still early in the evening and the media are still calling it a Gore victory.

Couldn't miss out on this one, the place was amazing. I went and freshend up and came down to the bar to watch proceedings. Of course I couldn't get into the ballroom where Hillary and Bill were scheduled to speak, but there were plenty of party faithfull in the same boat as me and the bar was plenty interesting...

Of course you all know what happened that night, so I won't go there, but when they gave New York to Hillary the place went nuts. Both Hillary and Bill had their tunr on stage upstairs, the place went more nuts.

Just when I figure it's all over and think about retiring for the evening Hillary and Bill decide to eat and come downstairs, handlers of course, but they came around the bar for a few minutes and helped us "celebrate" before heading to the restaurant.

Needless to say that in addition to very brief in person encounter with the "happy couple" there were plenty of other democrat celebs and media folks by the dozen there.

Sure it was a major coincidence I was in that city on business on that day and chose that hotel, but what I had intended to be an early and quiet evening with total indifference to the US Elections turned into a truly remarkable evening literally at ground zero.

A VERY memorable experience, but not very related to airlines, sorry.