Methinks he was referring to not what we think of now as the "gate" (the extended building reaching to the plane), but in fact walking right out on the tarmac.
Nah, I meant what we think of now as "gate". For instance, I remember going out to meet people at the gate at SFO in the 1990s. I'm not quite old enough - or perhaps didn't grow up in a small enough town? - to remember routinely walking out on the tarmac to greet a plane.
