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<LI class="articleSection first">THE MIDDLE SEAT<LI class=dateStamp>JULY 22, 2010The Golden Age of Flight

Go-Go Boots, White Gloves and Legroom: What Airlines Can Learn From the Past
By SCOTT MCCARTNEY

It's a common travelers' lament: Why can't airline service be like the good old days, when plane travel was glamorous, on-time, hassle-free and exciting?



Back to the Future

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Everett Collection Passengers watched a movie on a flight in the 1960s.

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Ah, the glory days of air travel in the 1950s, when Howard Hughes's TWA and Juan Trippe's Pan American lifted Hollywood stars and business titans across continents and even oceans in white-glove style. There was plenty of legroom, nary a security hassle and planeloads of excitement when people could buy a ticket to defy gravity and arrive in new cities in hours instead of days.

Some in Congress are behind a back-to-the-future legislative move to re-regulate the airline industry. Changes such as policing airline schedules, controlling fees, curbing overbooking and even imposing minimum service standards could help tidy up the current bus-in-the-sky mentality. The Department of Transportation has been writing new rules to protect passengers' rights.

The past has allure for travelers, of course, but with a common caveat with memories. Truth is, the good old days weren't all that good, with air travel of the past romanticized and comfort and safety issues glossed over. "The Golden Age has never existed,'' said former Virginia Gov. Gerald Baliles, who led a presidential commission in the early 1990s to revitalize the U.S. airline industry and hopes his recommendations may still be enacted. "The cyclical world of aviation travel has always had its challenges, for the carriers as well as the travelers."

The piston-driven planes of those days, like the Lockheed Constellation and Douglas DC-7, were noisy and often ferociously bumpy. They couldn't fly over storms and turbulence the way jet-powered airplanes can. Engine failures were more frequent. So were crashes. And the cost of a ticket was affordable for only an elite few.

A round-trip coach ticket between New York and Los Angeles was $208 in 1958, according to the Air Transport Association. You can still sometimes find a $208 ticket today, but that 1958 price is $1,570 in today's dollars.

"Most people who think of the Golden Age age of air travel probably didn't fly then," said Daniel Kasper, a managing director at LECG, an aviation consulting company. "The Hollywood image never focuses on how many people were left outside the gate because they couldn't afford it."
Another difference: Limited flight service. Getting across the country often required multiple stops. And making connections might mean changing airlines. "You couldn't get there from here," Mr. Kasper said.
Things changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, held up as another Golden Age of air travel when jets were proliferating. Jets were more reliable and safer than the piston-engine planes they replaced.

With jets able to carry more people and move them far faster than ever before, airlines found themselves with lots of seats to sell. They laid out cabins with generous legroom—three to six inches more than today per row in coach. Travelers enjoyed lots of empty seats to spread out into, too. The load factor, or percentage of seats filled, was 45.9% in 1968, compared to 80.4% in 2009.


To entice new fliers and build business with frequent travelers, airlines tried to one-up each other with scrumptious meals, attentive on-board service by stewardesses in hot pants and miniskirts and provocative "Fly Me" ads.

Boeing 747s, which started airline service in 1969 and opened international travel to the masses, had piano bars in first class. Even coach passengers were routinely offered three choices of meals.
"Airlines competed on the basis of service and not on the basis of price. And it was good. It's not just the memory of good ol' times—it was really good service," said Stanley Plog, an airline consultant who conducted studies on passenger comfort. He still recalls how tasty the Chateaubriand was on TWA.

Still, there were problems. Conga lines of jets at crowded airports, particularly in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, led to long delays and calls to modernize the nation's air-traffic control system. Sound familiar? In 1969, the government imposed a "temporary" measure that remains in effect today—takeoff and landing slot restrictions at the most-crowded airports.

Hijackings became common. In one month alone—January 1969—eight airliners were hijacked to Cuba, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. In October that year, Eastern Air Lines began using magnetometers to screen passengers. In September 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked three planes bound for New York and blew up the empty jets. President Richard Nixon ordered air marshals aboard jets and the use of X-rays to screen for weapons.
And safety was still an issue. From 1964 to 1973, there was an average of seven fatal accidents a year on U.S. airlines. The fatal accident rate per departure in 1969 was 13 times higher than in 2009.

And all that service and style was expensive, even with airlines offering advance-purchase economy fares.

With the cost still prohibitive for many, Congress and the Carter administration deregulated the industry in 1978. That opened the market to new interstate airlines and let carriers fly wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and at whatever prices they wanted.


Southwest Airlines
A Southwest Airlines publicity photo from the early '70s.



The results were dramatic. In 1977, the average price paid to fly one mile was 8.42 cents, according to the ATA. Adjusted for inflation, that's more than 30 cents a mile. Last year, travelers paid an average of 13.5 cents. In 1978, airlines carried 275 million passengers. Thirty years later, they carried 741 million. Roughly speaking, it costs less than half as much to travel today and nearly three times as many people are traveling.
Deregulation brought turmoil that continues today, including multiple bankruptcy reorganizations for some carriers, painful shutdowns for others. Among the names of the top 20 U.S. airlines in 1978, only six of them are still in use today. Grounded names include Eastern, TWA, Allegheny, Braniff, Western and Pan Am.

These days, no one is suggesting that fee frenzies, security hassles, surly service, long delays and confounding ticket rules mark any sort of Golden Age of air travel. When airlines don't have profits, it's hard to invest in a better product.

Travelers do have a lot more choices. They can buy first-class service if they are willing to pay for it, and the lie-flat beds and fancy meals of today's international business class and tomorrow's new jets compare well to the elegance of old. "Value" carriers like JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran provide rapid mass transportation at affordable prices—the bottom line to a good-quality air travel system.

If the nation makes long-delayed improvements in the air-traffic control system and other systems that his commission recommended in 1993, Gov. Baliles sees hope for improved profitability for airlines and thus better quality service for travelers.

"That might approach a Golden Age that so far has eluded all of us," he said.

But Mr. Plog says it will be hard to overcome the bus-in-the-sky mentality. Airlines have found time after time that customers focus on the lowest price and most won't pay extra for niceties.

"I love to fly," Mr. Plog said. "But today, I avoid it when I can."

cardiomd

Brief overview on deregulation and its effects, light read but has a few interesting tidbits of information (average cost per mile, etc.)

The Golden Age of Flight - WSJ.com

reddog25

It would be interesting to compare Captains pay adjusted for inflation. I was told that at the time a TWA Captain made a Cadilac a month

Airhoss

Still can and here it is...

DYNASTY HVY

I was told the same thing also, tried doing a google search and all I came up with is that pay is half of what it schould be and the future does'nt look any better in terms of pay .
Seems as if pilots pay info back then was kept close to the vest.


Fred

DelDah Capt

From some old DALPA contract comparisons, I found the 12 YR CAPT rates for 1985 on the L1011 ($170.39/hr) and the 727 ($143.35). Plugging those numbers into the government's cpi Inflation calculator comes up with $345 and $290 respectively in 2010 dollars. Needless to say, we're well behind those kind of numbers today.

I found an old ad for a 1986 Cadillac Eldorado with a price of around $24,000...in today's dollars, that's about $48,600.