Lead-in to air or Atlantic

As a detective, I started by analyzing the clue ‘Lead-in to air or Atlantic‘. I realized that the clue was asking for a word that came before either ‘air’ or ‘Atlantic’. I thought about possible words that could fit this pattern and found that ‘mid‘ stood out as a fitting option. The reason being that the word ‘mid‘ can be used as a prefix for the word ‘air’ to create ‘midair‘ and also for the word ‘Atlantic’ to create ‘mid-Atlantic‘. Additionally, ‘mid‘ could be seen to represent the middle or halfway point, which is relevant to both air and the Atlantic. After considering these insights, I concluded confidently that ‘mid‘ was the perfect answer that solved the mystery of the crossword clue ‘Lead-in to air or Atlantic‘.