An airport interview is an initial interview for a senior administrative position conducted at an airport hotel not too far from the campus in question. Meeting at an airport enables a search committee to interview a large number of candidates in a short period of time with a degree of confidentiality. At the conclusion of the airport interviews, a more limited number of candidates is invited back to the campus for two- or three-day visits, at which point the provost (typically) selects the top choice. In this article, the author, a midlevel administrator at a large research university, describes his first "airport interview" for the type of deanship that he is beginning to seek and his assessment of what went wrong in his interview that resulted to his failure to reach the campus-interview stage.