Airport has some characteristics in common with the early twentieth-century muckraking tradition of writers like George Lippard and Upton Sinclair whose semifictional books disclosed what industries or institutions were "really like." Hailey, however, does not probe as deeply or widely in his social analysis. His novel also has something in common with a long tradition of essentially melodramatic novels by writers of superior talent like Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Finally, for its "inside look" at social and historical phenomena presented according to the dictates of melodrama, this book can be related to the fiction of such contemporaries as Irving Wallace, Allen Drury, and Harold Robbins.