When Flying Was a Thrill 382
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Bob Greene writes that flying, with jammed-to-the-groaning-point cabins and torture-rack legroom; fees for everything from checking your bags to being handed a paltry package of food; and the endless, we'll-X-ray-you-to-within-an-inch-of-your-dignity security lines, is too often such a dreary, joy-sapping slog that it's difficult to remember that it was ever any other way. But back in the 1930s, '40s and '50s — even the 60s, flying was a big deal. When a family went on vacation by air, it was a major life event. 'Traveling by air in those years wasn't like boarding a flying bus, the way it is today,' says Christopher Lynch, author of "When Hollywood Landed at Chicago's Midway Airport," a celebration of the golden years of commercial air travel in the United States. 'People didn't travel in flip-flops. I mean, no offense, Mister, but I don't want to see your toes.' The trains were still king in those years and the airlines wanted to convince people that flying was safe. 'People were afraid to fly,' Lynch says. 'And it was expensive. The airlines had to make people think it was something they should try.' That's where Mike Rotunno came in, photographer-for-hire at Midway Airport in Chicago where cross-country flights in those years had to stop to refuel. His pictures of Hollywood stars as they got off the planes made air travel seem to be glamorous, sophisticated, civilized, and thrilling. 'Think of his photos the next time you're shoehorned into a seat next to a fellow who's dripping the sloppy innards of his carry-on submarine sandwich onto your sleeve,' writes Greene. 'Air travel was once a treasured experience, exciting, exotic, something never to be forgotten. You, too, could travel like Elizabeth Taylor.'"
You can still fly this way if you want to (Score:3, Insightful)
Just buy a ticket for business class.
mostly because there wasn't room for 3rd class (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, rich people looked rich back in the good old days. Same thing with the ocean liners in 1st class: very upper-class, luxurious, glamorous. But most people who traveled on ocean liners didn't travel in 1st class, so it was hardly the norm. The difference with early planes was that there was basically only a 1st class, due to a lack of room to include a 2nd class or steerage section.
I don't want thrills... (Score:5, Insightful)
I want safe, quick transportation from point A to point B at a reasonable price. Modern air travel mostly delivers this. It didn't use to.
Air travel was of dubious safety and blinding expense in the '30s, '40s, '50s - and wasn't particularly comfortable either. I don't wish to return to that era, one bit.
-Isaac
No one could afford it. (Score:2, Insightful)
It was also incredibly expensive.
The reasons travel today sucks is because its cheaper and thus more people do it.
Also, what kind of elitist prick wishes people would "dress up" to go on a goddamn airplane? How about I wear whatever I want and you shut up?
We don't need the pretension of fancy clothes in this millennium. By these standards Jobs and Gates are both slobs.
Re:Slow-flying news day (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is powered by your submissions. What have you submitted lately? If you don't like what's being submitted, submit something better yourself or go into 'recent' on the right hand side and down vote the crap. Stop whining about something you have control over.
Re:You can still fly this way if you want to (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly. The only people who flew in the 1930s to the 1960s were the rich. Why are we surprised that they flew in luxury?
The fact the the middle class can fly today only means that the price to fly has dropped dramatically.
Re:I don't want thrills... (Score:5, Insightful)
I want safe, quick transportation from point A to point B at a reasonable price.667 Modern air travel mostly delivers this.
Only if your definition of quick only includes time elapsed between take off and landing. Definitely not that fast if you time door to door and include everything.
Also, why isn't a 'medium' class anymore? One would think that any company that provided decent legroom at a reasonable price would make a killing. Seriously, I don't want to pay business fares just so I can have a flight in which I'm not worried about the retard on the front row putting their seat all the way down (at the risk of breaking my knees), but I'd be happy to pay twice the coach fare if I could have the legroom from the seat in front on mine (ie half the rows at twice the price).
A flight from Madrid to New York costs 400 euros in coach, around 3000 in business. Damn, give me something decent for 800! I don't need champagne, I don't need slippers, I don't need a private selection of movies. I just need the legroom.
Re:Isnt it better now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely right. I found out a friend was very sick just a few weeks ago - I bought my ticket on-line for the next day, checked in on-line immediately after and was on a different continent the following evening. I am not wealthy (by developed world standards) and it'll stretch my budget a bit but it was completely doable. I made it home before my friend died and was able to see her and the family.
I found out she was ill via a call on our Vonage phone - no additional cost to my friend calling me.
I have no desire to go back to an earlier time when I probably would not have found out until after she had died and not been able to afford going back - and even if I could it would have taken a lot longer than a day.
Re:I don't want thrills... (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh? Door to door, flying from Denver to San Francisco, it's about half a day. 2.5 hour flight, an hour and a half on each side for getting to/from the airport, boarding, etc. Toss in some random stops to 7-11 or something and you're looking at spending about 6-8 hours of travel time.
Am I missing something?
Yes, high speed trains, but of course they may not be available in your country or for your desired trip.
When available it's a no brainer. The total time is roughly is same (for distances up to 1000 km), and they go from city center to city center, and they're a lot more comfortable.
Attention Kmart Shopper (Score:4, Insightful)
You too, could travel like Elizabeth Taylor.
If you had Elizabeth Taylor's money. Today, if you have Elizabeth Taylor's money, you charter a jet.
Re:You can still fly this way if you want to (Score:2, Insightful)
He doesn't get groped because he flies in private jets. The TSA doesn't screen the filthy rich.
Yes, except the cutting edge always becomes normal (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise we'd all still be staring at a wheel or a flint axe and going "Woooow!" So its rather unfair to blame people for complaining about flying conditions when its a normal part of life no matter how amazing flying is technically.
Re:You can still fly this way if you want to (Score:2, Insightful)
Its not a reduced service, its a dramatic reduction in service levels - the two are not the same, as noted by the abundance of people willing to decry "cattle class".
The reduction in ticket prices have also slashed airline profit margins, to the point where in the past decade all major US airlines have declared bankruptcy at least once - consider that also in the wake of deregulation, the US has lost pretty much half of its major carriers, and the remaining carriers are still struggling to survive...
Hardly sustainable!
Re:You can still fly this way if you want to (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, just because lots of things have happened IN THE LAST 34 YEARS doesn't meane they are all due to deregulation.
You'll find that lots of other big companies have bought up or weeded out most of their competitors in other fields too. Back in the 90's I used to buy Computer Shopper magazine, where there were thousands and thousands of companies building PCs for you to buy. Today almost all those companies are gone. I guess that must be due to some deregulation. That or maybe, just maybe business fields tend to change over time even without deregulation being the cause.
I'll settle for pre-TSA days (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll settle for days not so far in the past. I used to fly out of Dallas Love Field, which is a fairly small airport. Park you car, walk to the check-in counter, walk to the gate, get on the plane. Somewhere in there you walked through a metal detector. Total elapsed time: 30 minutes.
Now, in the US with TSA security theater, you have to allow 90 minutes. An entire extra hour, times 600,000,000 flights per year: TSA costs the equivalent of more than 1000 lifetimes of time each and every year. Add to that the monetary and social costs of paying an army of morons to humiliate everyone, and you can only shake your head in disgust...
I want to go back to simple security measures, run by the airlines, who presumably have some interest in (a) efficiency and (b) customer service.
Re:Yes, except the cutting edge always becomes nor (Score:5, Insightful)
Adult should take stock and go WOW! Only children can say all your old stuff is shit.
Re:You can still fly this way if you want to (Score:4, Insightful)
It's dropping from middle class to working poor. You've got to be really dirt poor to benefit (economically) from taking a bus across country compared to flying.
4 days lost productivity is more than airfare, even at minimum wage.
Re:Yes, except the cutting edge always becomes nor (Score:4, Insightful)
The human brain makes any of our technology look like amateur rubbish so do you spend your day looking in the mirror thinking how amazing you are? Unless you're a complete narcissist I suspect not but compared to it your smartphone and an aircraft are like childs lego bricks. So no , adults shouldn't take stock and go wow all the time - you deal with the world the way it is.
AMTRAK (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that AMTRAK is missing the boat here and there is a big opportunity for other companies to bring back traveling by train big time.
First, there is a constant drone of opinion and advice to slow life down.
Second, as mentioned in the summary, traveling by air is a giant PINA.
I think that if done right, rail travel could be cheaper than air travel and much more pleasant.
Done right =
1. Non-stop routes.
2. Good food at normal restaurant rates.
3. Technology accommodations (Wireless, chargers, etc.)
4. Of course sleeping accommodations.
I've looked at traveling by rail instead of air before but at the moment it is much more expensive to go the same distance and includes and unreasonable number of stops (they have it like a stupid commuter bus). I seem to remember that I could have driven and saved almost two days over AMTRAK.
Now, where can I get a few billion dollars for start up costs (not including the money to buy off politicians)?
Re:The past sucked - time to admit it (Score:5, Insightful)
"The freaking rules," however, are in flagrant violation of at least the spirit, if not the letter, of the biggest "freaking rule" in the nation, the Constitution. Some of us take issue with this and so security becomes a big deal.
Re:AMTRAK (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-stop routes
Not going to happen. Since Amtrak is government underfunded and mismanaged it uses freight rails and has to pull over for any freight traffic, and every congressdick in the country makes sure that it stops in their district so they can tell their constituents that they're bringing home the tax dollars.
Aside from that, rail will probably never be fixable. The environmentalists pushing it live in abject terror of cars, and the people they want to use it live in abject terror of having to walk 10 feet unaided. Despite the fact that the Chunnel [wikipedia.org] seems to operate just fine, the two groups won't meet in the middle with drive-on carriages, because of course that would come from them evil european socialists.
Re:Yes, except the cutting edge always becomes nor (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not it. The reason we are no longer impressed by it is not that merely that it has become normal. Even when the shuttle program eventually got scrubbed, you can't tell me that anyone in those record crowds watching the last few takeoffs thought of it as normal. Even the folks who live down there were always impressed.
The reason we are no longer impressed with most technology like airplanes and cell phones is that we have come to depend on it, and it has let us down. When airplanes were relatively rare, you didn't have people depending on them for most of their travel. People drove cars. An airplane was an exotic experience because you didn't have to depend on it to get you somewhere that you had to be. In much the same way, nobody cared about dropped calls in the early days because they weren't using them for the bulk of their communication. It was too expensive.
As soon as any piece of technology becomes a regular part of your life, however, anything that goes wrong becomes a road block for you. Now that people depend on air travel for much of their work and pleasure travel—now that people have grown to depend on being able to readily go long distances for work and vacation—the delays and other problems have more of an impact because they don't build in that extra day to accommodate things going wrong. Similarly, now that many people use cell phones as their primary means of communication, dropped calls are a frequent hassle that bothers people more.
If you want people to be impressed by something that they actually depend on, you have to do the right thing every time. It has to "just work". Every time. As soon as that consistency starts to falter, people quickly lose patience. And for good reason. A flight delay can cause them to miss the next flight, which puts them stranded in an unknown city halfway across the country from home. That didn't happen nearly as much in the early days of flying, back when on-time performance was less important than getting you there. If your flight was late, to the extent possible, they held the next leg. Now, on many airlines, they're forbidden to do so, and as a result, there's a lot more uncertainty about the ability of air travel to get you where you're going, so when things go wrong, people get edgy. In short, people can't count on the airlines to do the right thing every time. Ditto for the cell phone companies who frequently seem to be in a battle to see who can screw the customer hardest while making it as hard as possible to get justice when they do so (with mandatory binding arbitration clauses, for example).
And this, in a nutshell, is why technology ceases to thrill—not because it has become commonplace, but because what was once optional has become essential, and because the companies that provide the technology invariably take advantage of that fact to let them get away with poorer service, poorer quality, poorer longevity, etc.