At the gleaming, new state-of-the-art airports which have just opened in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, the smell in the air is that of stinking fish. Both high-profile airport openings have turned into public relations disasters for Hong Kong and Malaysia, with passengers delayed for hours, luggage going missing, food and water running out, and cargo being left to rot - hence the rotten fish.
Designed to showcase the modern achievements of the two former British colonies, the new airports have served instead to give flight in Asia a bad name. Foul-ups and delays in Hong Kong have got so bad that newspapers have called for resignations from the airport management.
"It's hard getting a turkey to fly," said the English-language Hong Kong Standard scathingly. "The airport has become an expensive laughing stock," complained the Chinese-language Hong Kong Daily News.
Fresh fish, lobster and fruit arriving for Hong Kong were left to rot in the sun when the airport opened on Monday and the cargo handling system promptly broke down - in many cases because the computer had erased inventories.
Typical of the incidents causing the stink at the airport was the loss of a container worth £10,000 addressed to a seafood supplier, Mr Nelson Wong Hin-kan, which was stranded for nine hours. "I lost two-thirds of the fish," said Mr Wong, who supplies seafood from Indonesia and the Philippines to restaurants and markets.
The $20 billion Hong Kong airport at Chek Lap Kok was opened with great fanfare by Chinese President Jiang Zemin last week, but within hours of going into operation, the cargo system broke down so hopelessly that the main cargo operator has been forced to truck most goods back to the old Kai Tak airport 18 kilometres away for handling.
A similar horror story had already unfolded at the new airport in Kuala Lumpur which opened last week. Flight delays and backlogs have left passengers stranded for up to 10 hours, and vegetables, fish and consignments of tortoises have putrefied in the cargo complex.
A check by the Sun newspaper in the Malaysian capital revealed that freight forwarders could not locate items in the cargo bays for two days. An airport garbage truck driver said he was given crates which gave out a terrible stench and discovered they were filled with dead and dying tortoises, some of which crawled out of a crate which was accidentally broken.
Both airports have failed to move baggage efficiently. One of the biggest problems at Hong Kong was the failure of the "world's largest fully automated baggage-handling system". On Monday more than 10,000 items of luggage could not be loaded onto planes.
A Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt left with just 50 per cent of passenger luggage on board. Some of the bags for Monday's flights were still missing yesterday.
A cartoon in the South China Morning Post summed up public dismay with a cartoon which showed distraught airline passengers reacting in horror on being told by the captain: "Due to teething problems at Chek Lap Kok, we are diverting to Kuala Lumpur."
Chek Lap Kok was an opportunity to show the world Hong Kong's technological excellence on a grand scale, said the paper. Instead, this "confidence-building" occasion which everyone wanted may join economic downturn, avian flu and red tides on the register of "depressive events of the past year."