It is often easy to forget - whether we work in the business OR just as consumers of travel - that the well-oiled engine room of the industry is a remarkable phenomenon.
Yet sometimes it is only at the very extremes of that process that people get to see how finely tuned it actually is.
Last Monday (22 July), La Guardia Airport in New York was in the middle of a situation that many busy facilities around the world face every day of the week: weather disruption.
Around 20-25 aircraft (including an American Airlines flight to St Louis, Missouri, where I was heading) were backed up on the various aprons and taxiways as routes towards the Midwest were closed down due to storms in New York state.
After almost two hours of slowly ambling along towards runway 13, the captain announced the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 would need to return to the gate to get some more fuel - a period of time it was hoped would coincide with the route west reopening.
Cue a few moans and groans amongst passengers on what was an almost full flight.
But as the aircraft was pulling up to the gate it became obvious that something else was going on - emergency vehicles could be seen racing across the taxiways in the direction of the runways.
Just moments before, a Southwest flight from Nashville, Tennessee, had found itselfnose-down on the side of the runway after experiencing a problem with its forward gear on landing.
Within just a few minutes the captain announced the AA St Louis flight had been cancelled and passengers should return to the gate and await further instructions from the agent.
A few more grumbles, of course, but as travellers started queuing to speak with the AA representative at the gate the first pictures of the incident out on the runway started appearing on the TV screens at a nearby bar.
[Amusingly, CNN editors were clearly a bit confused as to which story to focus on as just an hour or so beforehand a child had been born to a famous British family coveted by folk in the US to ridiculous levels]
Nevertheless, La Guardia was now full of passengers disembarking from cancelled flights or returning to the terminals until the runways were declared open again and flights could resume (it was eventually around three hours).
In short: semi-organised chaos.
With every traveller having his or her own particular set of circumstances to fix, it would be easy to see how such situations could quickly spiral out of control - but this is where the speed of technology and good old fashioned customer service kicks in.
Many US airports have some kind of rebooking counter, but what happens when a huge number of passengers need alternative arrangements? It lands at the desk of the gate agents who were previously hard at work loading the flight.
Some passengers were busily trying to reach a customer service helpline via their mobiles (network coverage was sketchy, inevitably), but around 100 people queued at the gate counter.
Interestingly, a sign of the times with social media - many parents were sending their kids off to the corner of the terminal with a mobile phone to try and get pictures of the stricken Boeing 737!
Anyway, what very few of those in the queue realised is that as soon as the flight was cancelled the airline (and all those other carriers suffering the same fate with grounded or cancelled flights) was busily organising alternative flights.
The systems kick in immediately, knowing that there is a better chance of keeping the chaos in some kind of relative order than descending into utter mayhem.
Each gate agent still had to field some kind of query or quibble from each passenger (especially families or those on multi-leg trips), but amazingly - and to their credit - each appeared to be keeping extremely calm, despite many far-from-relaxed passengers.
Yes, of course, it's their job.
But to try to accommodate every requirement (in the face of some rather feisty behaviour from some), often looking up new routes and changing details yet again within a matter of minutes, sometimes on rival carriers, illustrates not only how well-trained gate agents are to react quickly to major disruption but also the flexibility of the technology behind the scenes to make it all work.
So, a tip of the hat to long-suffering gate agents - the majority of people in the queues at La Guardia last Monday (it was well into the evening by the time everyone had been dealt it) saluted you.
[Not sure if it was just TV crews eager to avoid doing voxpops with New Yorkers in Times Square about the arrival of the important baby mentioned earlier, but 24 hours later there were still half a dozen broadcast vans parked outside the terminal :) ]
NB:Southwest pic via NBC on Twitter.