7 ms·

This article is but one example of a tiresome genre: the paean to the supposed glory days of aviation. Passengers dressed up, dined on caviar, and smoked cigare

This article is but one example of a tiresome genre: the paean to the supposed glory days of aviation. Passengers dressed up, dined on caviar, and smoked cigarettes. Stewardesses were sexy, and liquor flowed in the expansive 747 lounge. These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks. I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me. But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account. Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.

huflungdung 3mo ago
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stephen_g 3mo ago
For the money things have actually got better. If you pay the equivalent (adjusted for inflation or compared to wages) of what they were paying back then for an international flight, you're in first class and on a good airline that's hugely better than anything from the 'golden age'. Even business class is cheaper and (again on good airlines) is better than what people had then - the planes are quieter, the seats lie flat, the food is good, lounge access with free food and drinks before and on any stopovers... It's kind of crazy that people compare the experience on a $1000 transalantic ticket and bemoan that the experience doesn't seem quite as good as something that was costing people the equivalent of 10-20x as much back then!
- duskwuff 3mo ago
  Air travel has also become ~100x safer on a per-passenger basis: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-million-passengers https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...
fosk 3mo ago
Function over form, or form over function? The endless debate. Not necessarily disagreeing with you but I understand the merits in cherishing “form” in a world that is - for the most part - devoid of beauty and taste.
SR2Z 3mo ago
I think the context that's missing from this discussion is just how long the 747 was in service. When it was new, pilots didn't directly control the engines - a flight engineer did. There were no moving maps and navigation was done with radio beacons and pilotage (of course, this required lots of fiddling with knobs and a notepad). There were no flight envelope protections, and we knew next to nothing about the dangers of rocketing across the ocean at Mach 0.9. The first encounter between a jetliner and volcanic ash was a 747; despite all four engines flaming out and the whole plane being wreathed in St. Elmo's fire, the pilots were able to safely restart all of them and nobody got hurt. People who love this jet love it because they see the problems it solved and how it kept on rising to the occasion as the world changed around it. I'm not going to pay 2x ticket prices to keep it alive either, but it is terribly romantic. If human beings are allowed to fall in love with machines this one is as good as any.
- sandworm101 3mo ago
  And the context of the different regulatory environment. Those fancy cabins in the 60s/70s were because prices/routes were controlled by government. Unable to compete on price, airlines competed on luxury. Which, at the time, largely boiled down to who which had the shortest miniskirts in the TV ads. Today's flying cattlecar hell is the result of the opposite, a dramatic market-driven race to the bottom of quality... followed by a price bounce to see how much money they can pull out of use before we give up and drive. The day we have self-driving cars good enough that we can sleep, domestic air travel is dead. Ill take 10 hours curlled up in the back seat of my car rather than the 10+ hours it takes getting to/from airports for a domestic flight.
  - shipman05 3mo ago
    Or we could just build trains (in the US, other wealthy places seem to already get this)
    - Forgeties79 3mo ago
      Seriously it is embarrassing how under developed trains are in the US. Yes there are some routes that don’t make sense but there are tons that do. It makes no sense. We’ve simply resigned to this general feeling of “well everything is probably too far apart and even if they aren’t it’s just not going to happen.”
Aloha 3mo ago
We would all have been better off if Boeing had replaced the 737 with the 757 as intended. Its quieter, more comfortable, and a better aircraft all around.
tolciho 3mo ago
The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.
NikolaNovak 3mo ago
I agree with you on the social aspects 100%. But still, I have a soft spot for the Golden ages of engineering well before my time - like many, I'm an apollo program geek. No matter how many documentaries I watch, books I read, websites I peruse, schematics I try to figure out, it is still beyond astonishing to me that we flew to the moon with 60s technology. I'll continue reading about it for rest of my life and be incorrectly melancholic about the simpler days of engineering :). While the 747 isn't my kink, it'd adjexent enough thay I think I can understand it - I imagine it's similarly fascinating to think of massive intercontinental airplane designed by slide rule , then flown across Atlantic without computers or gps or ils or any other amenities. More expensive and breakable and inefficient and polluting and just insane as it also may have been :)
Onavo 3mo ago
They were limited by the tech of the time too. A modern clean sheet redesign of a 747/A380 class airplane would look very different given modern composites and improvements in engine bypass and compression ratio.
dlcarrier 3mo ago
Here's one pilot's view of the glamorous days of the past: https://youtu.be/JjKSAp2ssY8?t=433 https://youtu.be/JjKSAp2ssY8?t=433 Poor safety was a big problem, too.
kelnos 3mo ago
This is a disappointingly cynical take. Sure, it's fine to criticize some of the specifics of this particular article, but the 747 was an engineering marvel for its time, and it was one of the major workhorses of commercial (and in some cases, non-commercial) aviation for a very long time. We're allowed to be nostalgic for it. I, like you, benefit from the modern age. I never even flew on a plane until I was 19 years old, in 2001, so I never experienced those so-called "glory days". But I think it's important to think about and memorialize those times. Smoking is bad. Objectifying stewardesses is bad. The whole "fancy party" type atmosphere of those days feels quaint and elitist now. The 747 itself isn't a great plane by today's standards, on several metrics. But that's fine. We can appreciate it for what it was in its time, and celebrate an aircraft that put in so many hours and miles of service.
deleted 3mo ago
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kccqzy 3mo ago
I hear you, but I do think you are in the minority here. It is human nature to imagine themselves being fabulously wealthy and belonging to the 1% or the 0.1%, and therefore enjoying the privileges of this rarefied club. Such paeans to the glory days of aviation is the same as the glory days of railroading (traveling in your private rail car across country) and the same as the owning and enjoying a trip on your own yacht. Most people are fascinated by the act of fantasizing themselves being so filthy rich in a different era.

huflungdung 3mo ago

[dead]

stephen_g 3mo ago

For the money things have actually got better. If you pay the equivalent (adjusted for inflation or compared to wages) of what they were paying back then for an international flight, you're in first class and on a good airline that's hugely better than anything from the 'golden age'. Even business class is cheaper and (again on good airlines) is better than what people had then - the planes are quieter, the seats lie flat, the food is good, lounge access with free food and drinks before and on any stopovers... It's kind of crazy that people compare the experience on a $1000 transalantic ticket and bemoan that the experience doesn't seem quite as good as something that was costing people the equivalent of 10-20x as much back then!

duskwuff 3mo ago
Air travel has also become ~100x safer on a per-passenger basis: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-million-passengers https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...

fosk 3mo ago

Function over form, or form over function? The endless debate. Not necessarily disagreeing with you but I understand the merits in cherishing “form” in a world that is - for the most part - devoid of beauty and taste.

SR2Z 3mo ago

I think the context that's missing from this discussion is just how long the 747 was in service. When it was new, pilots didn't directly control the engines - a flight engineer did. There were no moving maps and navigation was done with radio beacons and pilotage (of course, this required lots of fiddling with knobs and a notepad). There were no flight envelope protections, and we knew next to nothing about the dangers of rocketing across the ocean at Mach 0.9. The first encounter between a jetliner and volcanic ash was a 747; despite all four engines flaming out and the whole plane being wreathed in St. Elmo's fire, the pilots were able to safely restart all of them and nobody got hurt. People who love this jet love it because they see the problems it solved and how it kept on rising to the occasion as the world changed around it. I'm not going to pay 2x ticket prices to keep it alive either, but it is terribly romantic. If human beings are allowed to fall in love with machines this one is as good as any.

sandworm101 3mo ago
And the context of the different regulatory environment. Those fancy cabins in the 60s/70s were because prices/routes were controlled by government. Unable to compete on price, airlines competed on luxury. Which, at the time, largely boiled down to who which had the shortest miniskirts in the TV ads. Today's flying cattlecar hell is the result of the opposite, a dramatic market-driven race to the bottom of quality... followed by a price bounce to see how much money they can pull out of use before we give up and drive. The day we have self-driving cars good enough that we can sleep, domestic air travel is dead. Ill take 10 hours curlled up in the back seat of my car rather than the 10+ hours it takes getting to/from airports for a domestic flight.
- shipman05 3mo ago
  Or we could just build trains (in the US, other wealthy places seem to already get this)
  - Forgeties79 3mo ago
    Seriously it is embarrassing how under developed trains are in the US. Yes there are some routes that don’t make sense but there are tons that do. It makes no sense. We’ve simply resigned to this general feeling of “well everything is probably too far apart and even if they aren’t it’s just not going to happen.”

Aloha 3mo ago

We would all have been better off if Boeing had replaced the 737 with the 757 as intended. Its quieter, more comfortable, and a better aircraft all around.

tolciho 3mo ago

The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.

NikolaNovak 3mo ago

I agree with you on the social aspects 100%. But still, I have a soft spot for the Golden ages of engineering well before my time - like many, I'm an apollo program geek. No matter how many documentaries I watch, books I read, websites I peruse, schematics I try to figure out, it is still beyond astonishing to me that we flew to the moon with 60s technology. I'll continue reading about it for rest of my life and be incorrectly melancholic about the simpler days of engineering :). While the 747 isn't my kink, it'd adjexent enough thay I think I can understand it - I imagine it's similarly fascinating to think of massive intercontinental airplane designed by slide rule , then flown across Atlantic without computers or gps or ils or any other amenities. More expensive and breakable and inefficient and polluting and just insane as it also may have been :)

Onavo 3mo ago

They were limited by the tech of the time too. A modern clean sheet redesign of a 747/A380 class airplane would look very different given modern composites and improvements in engine bypass and compression ratio.

dlcarrier 3mo ago

Here's one pilot's view of the glamorous days of the past: https://youtu.be/JjKSAp2ssY8?t=433 https://youtu.be/JjKSAp2ssY8?t=433 Poor safety was a big problem, too.

kelnos 3mo ago

This is a disappointingly cynical take. Sure, it's fine to criticize some of the specifics of this particular article, but the 747 was an engineering marvel for its time, and it was one of the major workhorses of commercial (and in some cases, non-commercial) aviation for a very long time. We're allowed to be nostalgic for it. I, like you, benefit from the modern age. I never even flew on a plane until I was 19 years old, in 2001, so I never experienced those so-called "glory days". But I think it's important to think about and memorialize those times. Smoking is bad. Objectifying stewardesses is bad. The whole "fancy party" type atmosphere of those days feels quaint and elitist now. The 747 itself isn't a great plane by today's standards, on several metrics. But that's fine. We can appreciate it for what it was in its time, and celebrate an aircraft that put in so many hours and miles of service.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

kccqzy 3mo ago

I hear you, but I do think you are in the minority here. It is human nature to imagine themselves being fabulously wealthy and belonging to the 1% or the 0.1%, and therefore enjoying the privileges of this rarefied club. Such paeans to the glory days of aviation is the same as the glory days of railroading (traveling in your private rail car across country) and the same as the owning and enjoying a trip on your own yacht. Most people are fascinated by the act of fantasizing themselves being so filthy rich in a different era.