I could imagine how poor it would have looked in its pan-and-scan fullscreen format, with the constant split screens. How was it viewed on standard TV sets? Was it widescreen?
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"Airport" was originally broadcast in 1973 in full-screen pan-and-scan, the only format in which films were televised at that time. Letterboxing didn't come into play until the '90s--we hadn't realized what all we were missing! As far as I recall, TCM was the first to broadcast the Todd-AO version of "Airport" in letterbox.
shareI have a copy of the 80's era VHS and most of the split screen scenes are completely eliminated and just show the film segments of the people talking in fullscreen. Modern pan and scan versions go to letterbox on those segments.
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Pan & scan was standard TV formatting from the time it was first invented around 1961. (The people who devised it as a method of broadcasting widescreen movies were actually given an Academy Award for devising p&s.) Depending on a film's aspect ratio you'd lose anywhere from just a barely discernible bit of the picture (1.66:1) to well over half of it (2.55:1 or greater). Plus you'd pick up the grain of the film. But well into the 80s this was normal and people didn't think much about it. Virtually all early VHS releases of w/s films were made using TV p&s prints.
I saw Airport in a theater in 1970 and when it came to television not only the split screen, but the need to jump from side to side to see characters talking -- standard stuff in all widescreen films -- was even more evident than usual, though in my case having seen the film at the movies made my own experience different from first seeing w/s films on TV in the p&s format, which was my primary exposure to movies of the 50s and well into the 60s.
Letterboxing met a lot of resistance when it began in the late 80s. To this day there are still people who object to those so-called "black bars" even though they're seeing the whole picture.