Jet-age glamour was more than just aesthetic: its promise of motionless movement reshaped perception of time and space
In October 1958, Pan American Airways began its first regular jet service across the Atlantic. Compared with other forms of travel, flying was already fast. In 1946, it took around 20 hours to fly from New York to Paris, as opposed to the four-and-a-half days to cross the Atlantic by ocean liner. But Pan Am’s new jet-powered Boeing 707, moving at an unprecedented speed of 500 to 600 miles per hour, cut transatlantic travel time to a mere seven hours (about the length it remains today).
The jet’s incredible speed seemed to some to embody the historical moment. As one author put it in 1959: ‘Every aspect of our time is marked by movement … the aircraft is the most eloquent symbol of this transformation.’ In January 1958, Frank Sinatra’s album Come Fly with Me was released, with a cover that prompted the silver-tongued singer to complain (understandably) that it looked like a poster advertisement for Trans World Airlines (TWA). The album featured travel-themed songs and lyrics referencing a host of far-flung places (Hawaii, Paris and Capri), while never mentioning how fast you could get there. Instead, the title song promised the lovers would ‘float down to Peru’ and ‘just glide, starry-eyed’. Come Fly with Me emphasised the quality of the jet’s movement: barely perceptible, natural and easy. It would be a fitting anthem for an era – roughly the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s – that’s come to be known as the jet age.
Come Fly With Me (1958). Photo supplied by the author and courtesy Capitol Records.
The jet also increased load capacity, lowering prices and expanding the market for flight. Its speed appealed in particular to businessmen and tourists, who valued saving travel time. This led the burgeoning airline industry and expanding travel business to anticipate that transatlantic flight would quickly overtake ocean passage as the way the majority of travellers would journey between the old and new worlds. They were right. As early as 1958, more people flew across the Atlantic than took the boat. Because this crossing had been such an important site of long-distance travel, the change contributed to the feeling that the jet had made a major social impact, although the era of mass air travel was still a decade away.And from FT Alphaville:
What set the jet apart from other planes was not that it flew more quickly (although it did). People willingly hurtled through the air at more than 500 miles an hour in a metal tube not simply to get where they were going faster but also because of the way that the jet rode. In one of Boeing’s best-known ads of the period, a mother and a little boy are depicted flying in the Boeing 707 in domestic comfort – not ensconced in glamorous cutting-edge luxury. Because of the jet’s motion – described as serene and ‘free from vibration’ in ‘high, weatherless skies’ – the manufacturer promised that passengers would be able to hear a watch tick and see a coin balance on a table. A flower (a metaphor for Mom herself, no doubt) would remain fresh through the entire flight. The ad highlights the quality of the ride rather than the speed of the jet. This was a new kind of experience: going far, fast, while seeming to go nowhere at all....
....MUCH MORE
Alphavid: The airline sector is in denial about its imminent collapse
And finally, an observation from a man with hard-won practical experience of Izabella' topic:
...Move on to failures of airlines. Here’s a list of 129 airlines that in the past 20 years filed for bankruptcy. Continental was smart enough to make that list twice. As of 1992, in fact--though the picture would have improved since then--the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country’s airline companies was zero.
Absolutely zero.
I like to think that if I’d been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 when Orville Wright took off, I would have been farsighted enough, and public-spirited enough--I owed this to future capitalists--to shoot him down. I mean, Karl Marx couldn’t have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did.
—Warren Buffett in Fortune Magazine;, 1999
