Many people's first experience of China is Beijing's Capital Airport. It doesn't make a good impression. The facilities are primitive. Arriving passengers sometimes have to walk from the plane to the Soviet-style terminal building. Inside the atmosphere is institutional. There are no newsstands. Lavatories are . . . well, let's put it this way, attendants burn incense to combat the smell.
Yet it's one of my favourite airports. This may be contradicted by other travellers, or confounded by my next arrival, but I find it to be one of the most efficient points of entry into any country in the world. Passengers zip through the formalities. Recently I walked from the plane to my car in less than five minutes.
Everything is on a human scale. One doesn't have to negotiate miles of rubber and tin corridors (as in Heathrow). Immigration officials are efficient. Customs checks are rare.
Contrast communist Beijing's antiquated aerodrome with that of capitalist Hong Kong. For a start, arriving in the former British colony is not for the timid. Jumbo jets make dive-bomb descents past apartment blocks where Cantonese families can be glimpsed eating dim sum.
Hong Kong's airport is also past its sell-by date. The bookshops are cramped and the restaurants pretty awful. The duty free shops are a rip-off. There are always queues at immigration and at the taxi rank.
Without a doubt the best place to arrive in south-east Asia is Singapore's Changi airport. Both Changi and Singapore Airlines were last week judged the finest in the world by Business Traveller magazine. The airport topped all categories for layout, ground transport, shopping, customs, immigration, baggage handling and catering.
It will soon have competition for the number one spot. Hong Kong will open a new $9.1 billion (£36 billion) airport at Chek Lap Kok in April next year which will revolutionise air travel in the Asia-Pacific area. An island was flattened and soaring bridges built to make it the wonder of the aviation world.
When it gets going, Chek Lap Kok will be able to handle a staggering 35 million passengers a year, many of whom will arrive by railway carriage at check-in desks in architect Sir Norman Foster's airy terminal building (where Aer Rianta will operate 12 liquor and tobacco shops).
Hong Kong is the symbol of an aviation revolution taking place in eastern Asia. The number of air passengers is growing fast. At June's Paris Air Show, Asian orders for new planes outnumbered those of any other region. Almost everywhere new airports are being built or existing facilities privatised, extended or refurbished - if one excludes Cambodia, where the airport terminal at Phnom Penh was filled full of holes in recent fighting.
Internal travel in China is becoming as routine and comfortable as in the West, though its airlines still have some catching up to do in customer service - for example in the choice of in-flight movies. China Air is forever showing a banana-skin film of show-jumpers hitting fences, skiers crashing into trees and other accidents, which is hardly designed to inspire confidence.
The skies over China will become increasingly crowded in the coming years, according to a recent Airbus Industrie report. Airbus alone has orders for 95 new aircraft for Chinese companies. Nine airports were opened in 1995 and a new generation of modern air terminals is under construction.
China plans to build 41 airports in the next decade, and install the latest radar-controlled air traffic control system. Shanghai will open a new airport in 1999 with a handling capacity of 20 million passengers a year.
And then it will be Beijing's turn. From the grimy windows of the 1950s arrivals buildings, one can see already a large structure shrouded by scaffold netting rising against the distant corn fields and peach orchards. This is the skeleton of a new state-of-the-art terminal, which will be completed in 18 months.
With China's opening-up policy, passenger flow through the airport has been increasing by 15 per cent per annum. The new airport will be able to handle 10 million passengers a year, four times the present number.
The Americans have a saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's a pity that cannot be applied to Beijing Capital Airport, though no one, of course, could possibly argue that a world capital should not have a world-class international airport.
But somehow I suspect that when the gleaming new terminal opens with its docking extensions, extended corridors and vast immigration and customs halls, I'll find myself longing for the good old days when you could walk from the plane to the car in five minutes.