Stuff You Should KnowToday we take to the friendly skies to detail the fascinating history of air travel. From planes with piano bars and lounges to the current no frills varieties.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. If you put us all together, you get the cast of Wings.
I watch a little bit of Wings, but not much.
It was actually one of those I don't want to say unsung because it was pretty big when it was out. But I think in retrospect a lot of people who like, say like Friends or something like that are missing out on a really great show.
Yeah, yeah, I watched.
I don't know why it never got its hooks in me because I did watch a little bit of it, and the cast was great. Tony Shaloub, Stephen Webber.
Tim Daily, don't forget Tim Daley and Crystal Bernard.
Yeah, Tim Daily and Weber.
Yeah, Stephen Webber the Man. So yeah, anyway, go watch Wings. But that's not what we're talking about today. That's not the point of episode. This episode is tangentially related. That's why I brought Wings up in the first place, because we're talking about the history of air travel, and it was actually a lot more fascinating than I thought.
Chuck, really, because I just I'm fascinated by this constantly.
There's chunks of it that I love and am fascinated by, but overall is a whole concept. I was I was impressed by how fascinated I was by it.
Yeah, big, you were impressed by your own fascination.
Yeah, I was like, Wow, there did it go? Josh, you really did fascination right.
Uh So, thanks today for help with this one. And you know, we're kind of just going to walk you in the timeline sort of way through passenger air travel. Uh not you know how planes work or not, plane crashes and hijackings and stuff like that. But what was it like from the very first moment human beings stepped on a plane in for a commercial type flight, and how that's changed over the years, from food to bathrooms to smoking to like the terms we used to talk about the people who work there, Right, So we should probably start if we're going to talk about this to the very first passenger airline flight, which was a flight of one human being on January first, nineteen fourteen, from the Saint Petersburg Tampa Airport.
I'm sorry.
Airboat Line was a company. They flew across Tampa Bay. Three thousand people came out to watch this twenty minute flight. The airline was around for three months, flew about twelve hundred people. And if you're wondering how much that costs back then, about five bucks for a one way ticket and ten for a round.
Trip, which is a million dollars today.
To fly over Tampa Bay.
But no, but get this, at the time, it was a two hour steamship ride or a ten hour train ride, So a twenty minute flight was not bad. I would have coughed up some money for that to save that time. I thought it was more like a proving ground for the guy who created the planes. Yeah, but that did kind of establish this concept that people would pay you to fly them around in these new fangle airplanes. I don't know how much it would have, like, like how long it would have taken to really kind of gain ground had it not been for the postal service, though, because like with a lot of things, the US government kind of took the biggest risks and absorbed the biggest initial costs in researching and figuring out how to establish commercial flight.
Essentially, the first international flight was also from Florida and it went to Cuba and just put a pin in this flight because this will come back. It was Aero Marine Airways and they ran for about four years in the early nineteen twenties in wicker plane seats, and I was just curious, are you scared of those?
Oh?
Good question. I saw a picture of them, and no, I would have been okay with these.
So it's strictly wicker wheelchairs wheelchairs.
Yes, it's the combination of the two, so old timing wheel chairs.
So walking into a peer one doesn't freak you out.
No, no, okay, it makes me think I'm a promin about to have my picture taken.
Okay, all right, great.
So, like you said, the Saint Petersburg Tampa airboat line folded in a few months, Aeromarine Airways folded in four years. And I mean the fact that planes had been invented by then. Eventually they would have gained enough ground that we would have commercial aviation like we do today. But who knows how long it would have taken had the US government not gotten involved, Because, like with a lot of other major technologies that we have today, the government stepped in and took on the risk and the initial costs in developing commercial aviation, and they did it under the auspices of the postal Service.
Yeah, airmail Baby. May fifteenth, nineteen eighteen is when the first air mail flights took off, servicing at the time only DC, Philly and New York. And little side note that's kind of fun. The very famous stamp. I know, we talked about it in stamp collecting, the inverted Jenny. There was a printing error in this plane was upside down, and that was a very limited run of these upside down stamps. So it's one of the most valuable stamps in the world. But that was commemorating these first air mail flights. It took a couple of years and they opened it up to across the country, so by nineteen twenty you could airmail something from New York to California. And it was a big success through the nineteen twenties such that they eventually were like, all right, now we can go private with this.
Yeah, they handed over the job of delivering the mail to private companies. So now we had commercial aviation, but it was all mail and cargo, right, But eventually that evolved into also moving people from place to place. So that's where commercial aviation, at least in the United States, but kind of around the world really finds its footing, like that's where it grew from. I just find that fascinating, Oh totally, And I wasn't expecting to find it fascinating.
You really let yourself down, huh. Yeah.
So, like you said, in the nineteen twenties, they said, hey, why don't we start flying rich white people all over the country, because that's exclusively what it was for a long time, a round trip from New York to LA And this is not NonStop. There are lots of layovers to fuel up and stuff like that. It was two hundred and sixty bucks in the nineteen twenties, which amounts to our friends at the West Egg Inflation website to about forty six hundred bucks today. That back then that was half the price of a new car, and so it was rich people. They only flew about six thousand people in the year nineteen twenty nine, which you know, it was very exclusive.
At first.
You had to fly low because the planes weren't pressurized, so it was a very rocky, turbulent flight. They were very cold because the planes were insulated. They were incredibly loud. I think the tri motor ten goose and if you're a well I was about say, if you're an aviation enthusiasts, you already know these planes. But I encourage people to become aviation enthusiasts because there's nothing more fun than looking up these old planes like the ten Goose. I don't know about how rare, but I haven't seen that many tri motors in my day. Sure, so it was kind of cool. It carried twelve people and flew at one hundred and twenty decibels decibels at takeoff.
Right, which I saw a chart, And that is louder than being at the front row of a rock concert. I just assumed they were accepting Dinosaur Junior from that.
Yeah, yeah, and mud honey, I can vouch for that one too.
Right, So it's still really loud, loud enough that the stewards had to communicate with the passengers using like megaphones. Yeah, like the old timey ones that they used to use at pep rallies and you know the old Yale days at the turn of the last century.
Right, no diet coke.
Right, So, as you put it, flying was really awful. It was not a fun affair. It was just so novel that people still put up with the cold and the noise and the pukiness. But train travel was still like it was more affordable, it was more reliable because there are tons of plane breakdowns at the time. Basically some things never changed is what I took from that. But trains were still kind of like the way to go. It was just flying was just so luxurious and such a novel that actually people used to come out and watch planes take off at the airport. I guess LaGuardia had like a skywalk where people would come and watch the planes take off, and there would be more people during the like a single day that frequented the skywalk than flew in or out of LaGuardia.
Yeah, and that's that's still a fun thing. I think a lot of cities have either municipal airports that have like bars nearby. We have one here in Atlanta. The fifty seven Spider Group is so great World War two themed restaurant and bar where we shot some video stuff years ago.
But it's cool.
You can go sit out on a bar patio and watch the planes take off and it's a lot of fun.
I enjoy it.
That was from our TV show where we were doing Cloud seating.
Oh, I thought it was one of those interstitials.
I'm pretty sure it was the cloud seating part. Yeah, with the with the baseball game where it rained or the softball game.
Oh, you know what we did both.
We did cloud seating for the baseball game because we faked being in a biplane and flying when it was in fact just sitting on the ground. And we also I remember went over there to shoot an interstitial on Japanese stragglers because we were at one point wandering through the bamboo on that problem.
Yeah, that's right. They have like World War two jeeps and stuff there.
And we probably did that because our good buddy Chad who made that show, could like shoot there for one hundred.
Bucks or something.
So anyway, trains, like you said, were reliable, they were comfy, people could afford it. Planes travel wasn't really hitting it big at that point, but this is when it started becoming a thing. So like, hey, we need to know how to talk about this stuff, and so they kind of borrowed from steamships as far as the terminology goes, right.
Yeah, and one reason, so yes, you have stewards that were we call flight attendants today. But that's just like on a ship. There was the captain of the plane, not the pilot. They call them airlines, very similar to calling them cruise lines. I even saw a picture of an early plane and they had straight up portholes for the windows on the plane. So I'd never noticed it before, but it did borrow a lot of terminology, and I think the reason why is because a lot of the early planes were airboats. Essentially, they were like LaGuardia Is on the water because it it was originally like a marine airport, like for airboats to fly in and out. Did you know that?
I did not know that, but I'm not surprised.
I found it fascinating.
Yeah.
Well, that very first flight company in Tampa was called an airboat exactly right.
Yeah, so there was like kind of like a distinction. I think. Also they were like, see, everybody likes cruising on steamships. This is basically the same thing. We're just the words are essentially the same. So there you go.
Yeah, but these can't to the ocean. They'll just fall from the sky and maybe land in the ocean.
Yeah, it's a two fer.
You mentioned Stewarts.
That was what the terminali changed over the years from Stewart, eventually to Stuart S because the first stewards were exclusively male. In the nineteen thirties, a woman named Ellen Church came along. She was a nurse from Iowa who wanted to be a pilot but was not able to because it was in the nineteen thirties and she was a woman. So she said, all right, I want to change the way the game is on the plane then, and let's get rid of these male stewards and bring in the Stewart s, which was a name that lasted all the way up until the late nineteen seventies when the term flight attendant came along. But as someone who grew up in the seventies and eighties and nineties as you did, it was not It took a while for flight attendant to catch on.
I would say it took a good twenty five to thirty years before it was. You just did not hear the word stewardess anymore.
Yeah, and you'd still hear it occasionally from some of our boomer relatives.
So Ellen Church, she was a pioneer, a groundbreaker. She worked for Boeing, which became United. Didn't know that answers a lot of questions though, and she hired Boeing's first eight stewardesses. She only flew for I think like eighteen months a year and a half because she was in a car wreck and went back to nursing. But she that was it, like the genie was out of the bottle. Because I think we talked about this in our Flight Attendant episode. The premise was if you were on a flight and there was a woman there, she would have a calming, homie influence. But also there was like a subtle dare like are you going to be such a sissy that this woman is able to fly and you can't because you're scared? Come on? So like all that combined just opened the door for stewart is from that point on, but not women pilots, not for a long time.
Yeah.
And one thing that we didn't mention that is a huge, huge deal was not only was Church and nurse, but she recruited other nurses. And all of those first eight stewardesses were nurses, and almost all the early flight attendants were nurses. And you know, the idea again not just you know, besides being a woman that can help reassure you, but a nurse that's on board is really going to help reassure you because they just have that. A nurse's got to have a good demeanor, got a good bedside manner, or in this case, first class seat side manner.
To me, I find it less than reassuring. It's like, well, what all goes on planes that you need a nurse on them at all times?
You know you're overthinking it.
I would have back then too, I would have old time you overthought it.
Yeah, So those were the early flight attendants, these these women who were nurses. But again Church could not become a pilot because they didn't allow that. For She's probably another forty years after she came along.
The first woman pilot commercial airline pilot I could find started flying in nineteen sixty nine. Her name was Terry Whideroo, who flew for Scandinavian Air Systems says, and then four years later in the United States, Emily Howell Warner started flying for Frontier and Bonnie Tobersie in the same year. In nineteen seventy three started flying for American and Warner became the first captain, not just pilot, I think in nineteen seventy six. So it took a little while for women to make it out of the cabin to the cockpit.
Yeah, and we should point out too that Bonnie Tobersie that was her name, right, Yep, she was a pilot at twenty four years old. That's disturbing to me. That disturbs me today. Then it would disturb me even or maybe it would have been more believable back then. But definitely, I'm not trying to be ages. But if I see a twenty four year pilot getting on my delta flight, I'm just inherently a little bit freaked out. It's probably wrong of me, probably showing my age. I just want a little bit of experience, you know.
Yes, but I think the ages are different. I think back in nineteen seventy three, twenty four year old was akin to like a fifty year old today. No, I'm just trying to make you feel better here.
Well, how would you feel?
I don't all of a sudden, I feel like I'm a twenty four year old and age is jerk for worrying about that. Would do you think most people or would you worry about.
That if they were like the captain, Well, she was a pilot at the.
Time, the pilot at least.
I mean, if there were other people who were older in there, i'd feel better. If it were just the one twenty four year old, i'd be nervous. Yeah, they brought there and we have little to do with them being twenty four. But there's only so much experience you can cram into those twenty four years.
That's what I'm talking about. It's experience.
I have nothing against twenty four year olds, but unless they're like, no, they started flying you know, Promes when they were seven, Yeah.
Right, their child air prodigy.
Anyway, twenty four seemed young, and I just thought that was funny.
Have you realized that we haven't taken a break yet?
No, but it's a perfect time too.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
All right, I'm gonna go think about what I've done today and then we'll be.
Right back.
Learn and stuff with Joshua job stuff.
You shine up, so chuck. Believe it or not, we've only made it to the nineteen thirties.
Wooh.
The whole thing really kind of started in the twenties. And get this, so you said in nineteen twenty nine, six thousand people flew in the entire year. Yep, less than a decade later, nineteen thirty eight, more than one point two million Americans alone flew every year, So it had really started to open up in the nineteen thirties, but it was still business travelers typically and wealthy people.
Yeah.
Absolutely, and the planes, you know, and this is why people started flying more and things got a little bit better. Still cost a lot of money, but it was a little more comfy. And thirty three, Boeing came out with the dual prop two forty seven gorgeous plane. This had an insulated cabin, it was the first one where you weren't freezing, had twelve cushioned upholstered seats, it had hot and cold water, it had food service, and it was just it was a step up. And this was in nineteen thirty three.
Yeah, yeah, And I think you're right. I think that's why air travel became more popular because the planes just got nicer. After Boeing released the two four seven niner, Douglas Aircraft Company came up with the DC three, which.
Is what's a niner?
It's just an air airline lingo thing cbka.
Oh I thought it meant nine, it did.
I just added it because I can't say Boeing two four seven without adding a niner.
Okay, But to be clear, it's not the two four seven nine.
No, it's just the two four seven niner slash niner. So you don't even have to be an airplane enthusiast to be like, I've heard of the DC three before. That's because by the end of the nineteen thirties, ninety percent of all the airplanes flying around in the world were DC threes, and even Boeing, which remember had its own airline that became United, basically flew with DC threes even though they were the ones making the two four sevens niners.
Yeahbsolutely.
Thankfully, the Douglas Aircraft Company gave us the DC stands for Douglas Commercial. The Douglas Commercial three had twenty one seats, had an actual kitchen, a little mini kitchen galley, carried a lot more fuel, and it was the first one that could go NonStop from New York to Chicago at that point. And it was did you say the percentage that ninety percent were DC threes?
You bet I did. I said nine or zero percent, right.
And I found this fun little story I sent to you. The DC three is just a gorgeous plane. And there's one that is at least a few years ago. I couldn't find any update. But in twenty twenty one in Finland, to Finish air brought out a DC three that was eighty years old, restored it for service and it did forty member flights over that summer and their plan and their goal was for that thing to just keep it going and so it eventually would hit one hundred year mark.
Very nice.
That's like a would you go on it?
No, okay, no, I'm not even afraid to fly. I'm just smart.
Oh it's such a beautiful plane though. I love it for sure.
So I think we've reached the end of the thirties by now, right.
Sure.
And you had said at the outset that we were kind of following a timeline that is a lie because we're hopping around here or there. You're right, And this is a good example of that because we're going to talk now about airplane bathrooms, because there's a lot of myths around airplane bathrooms and we're going to extinguish them with extreme prejudice.
That's right.
There were at bathrooms very very early on on airplanes, like other things were modeled on ships and steamers. That was the bathrooms are no different. They were much much bigger than they are now. Very nice, but what you did was you just peeped and poop pooed and.
And it's sort of like an outhouse.
It was just a glorified bucket that someone emptied after the flight. And they did that until we got to the sort of blue chemical water toilets that came about later.
Yes, but even after the blue chemicals were introduced, it was still essentially a tank, a holding tank under the toilet seat. But we have a person to praise, a saint named Saint James Kemper, who came up with the vacuum flushed airplane toilet. And what he should have done is said, it's the vacuum flushed airplane toilet. No, it's not actually just flushing it out into the atmosphere, even though it sounds like it.
Yeah, I think a lot of people probably think that, right.
Oh, totally in the back of my mind every time, I'm like, eh, it's possible. Yeah, it's what it sounds like. It sounds like it. It just opens the toilet up and all of a sudden there's nothing between you and the air that you're flying through at five hundred miles an hour, That's what it seems like to me, right, because it makes that same sound, But what it's actually doing is using pneumatic action to suck down sometimes at one hundred and thirty miles an hour. I think I'm like the airbus A three eighty into that holding tank that's way far away now from the seat, so it's far less gross, but somebody still has to pump it out every after every flight. And I saw that on an average seven forty seventh flight, two hundred and thirty gallons of sewage are produced. Oh gosh, I mean yeah, at least it's not a bucket.
Yeah.
And as a as a reminder, I am so averse to sounds like ambulances.
I plug my ears when out.
That's right, yes, yeah, including airplane bathrooms.
Right, it's the worst. That's just one of the sounds my ears can't take.
Yeah, I'm interested by this now, I'll say, I'm fascinated by this.
Are you impressed with that?
Is it the I'm impressed that I'm fascinated by it? Yeah?
Yeah, that's what I mean.
Is it? Is it that it's a high pitch sound. Is it that it's a washing sound? Is it that? What is it about that sound that you don't like? And apologies to everybody who has misophonia at the whoosh sound.
It is super super loud, it's super super sudden and sharp, and it's a super small space. So it's just it's too much for me in that little space.
I'm with you. It is jarring. I have to remind myself, like, no, don't, don't get pushed back and try to steady yourself by putting your hand on the wall. Never touched the wall. It is a jarring sound. I agree with you, but it's overwhelming essentially, is what you're saying.
Yeah, okay, you can wash up.
I got you. No, I would you cut your hand off at that point?
So another thing we can definitely say has not happened. Another myth is that frozen blue feces and pp don't have you know, don't come out of the plane and kill people like at the beginning of that episode of Six Feet Under. There may be frozen blue stuff, but it's from a leak or something that has that freezes when it hits the air. It's not actual body stuff.
Well, I think the myth is that it's purpose. I think that leaks do happen, and chunks of ice have hurt injured people before. I don't know if anybody's been killed by it. But the other thing that can happen is that this ice, which is they call it blue ice, which is it's that sewage that's produced, like the chemicals and the water and the waste all combined. Yeah, it can depending on where it happens and how what altitude is dropped out, it can melt on the way down, and so you can be splattered by this disgusting sewage rain or have ice, you know, come through your house and bash your shoulder, like happened to one poor woman I think in Alabama or Louisiana.
Do you remember the did You Eat a one six ft under? Right?
Sure? I watched the whole thing.
Oh okay, you remember that episode that was one of the openers.
No, I don't, but I'm not surprised.
That it was one of those where they try and they started doing it more and more, where they would try and mislead you and you would think like, oh, this is how that person's gonna die, and this is one I can't remember what happened at the beginning, But I think it's like, you think this guy is going to have a heart attack or something, and then he's like, I'm going to go cut the grass, and he goes out in the backyard and through the kitchen window you just see the blue why hit.
It was pretty good.
I went back and watched just the last episode again, it's really good, but it just does not have the same impact if you haven't watched like the whole series leading up to it recently. Yeah, yeah, agreed, one of the great, all time great last episodes though, for sure.
Totally great finale. All right, so now we're flying. We're back to the timeline.
Okay, good, I was a rotten Meyer.
So we're back to World War Two.
During World War Two, there was a lot of obviously restrictions for military rationing of fuel, so there wasn't a ton of air travel commercially during World War Two. But right after that people really got into it, and nineteen fifty five was finally when air travel overtook train travel in the United States.
Yeah, and two years after that, it became more likely that somebody would fly by plane to Europe than take a steamship. So by nineteen fifty seven, air travel had become the dominant the dominant factor in American travel.
New airlines were launching all over the place. There was a lot of competition in trying to get customers, but it was all the way until nineteen seventy eight that the airlines were deregulated. So previous to that, the government said what routes you could fly. I don't know if they set the prices, but the prices had to be the same. I'm sure they worked with the airline.
No, they set the prices well by working with the airlines, so because they obviously couldn't bankrupt the airlines.
No, no, no, But you also said what rot they're allowed to fly. There are also routes that they had to fly, like cities that you would be like what you used to fly from New York to Topeka NonStop? Yeah, they used to do that because the federal government was like, Topeka needs airplanes to come get people too. They want to get out of there, So they made sure that cities around the country were serviced that. After deregulation, that was one of the first things that stopped. They're like, we're not flying the Topeka anymore. We'll talk about deregulation in a second, but before deregulation, because the prices of the tickets were the same essentially across the board, the way that airlines competed for business was by being like, come aboard our airline and be treated like a king or queen for your flight. It's going to be amazing.
That's right.
United had a literal red carpet if you were going to jump on their DC seven, which was the way a four prop Douglas commercial aircraft, another gorgeous plane in flight. Meals were really pretty special at the time. There were multi multi course dinners. I mean, nowadays the only thing I fly is Delta, and I think first class is the only one that has meals even I don't think anyone else even gets a meal. But back then it was just a lot fancier that was real silverware, which they may have now, I don't know, and tablecloths and stuff like that, dude. And then they also tried to, you know, make the your kids feel special by giving them like junior stewardess or junior pilot wings and stuff like that.
The meals, like if you look up airline food of the past or something like that. And look at old photos there's like people in chess hats, carving like hams and roast beef like seatside. It was amazing. Like the kind of meals people were served. Yeah, it was just it's nuts. And you can look at old like menus and stuff too. It's it was a whole different ballgame. And that was like your ticket included that in the in the price, and everybody on the plane got that kind of treatment.
Yeah, and there weren't as many people on these flights, so you could afford to do food a little better, not afford costwise, but it's just hard to You couldn't feed, you know, four hundred people well on a plane.
Not well no, And I saw that at least in some airlines. They would prepare these meals like an hour before the flight and put them on and yeah, you can't do that with four hundred, but you could with fifty maybe.
Yeah.
So one of the other things that they did was encourage smoking, like not only allowed smoking, they encouraged it. They're like, kick back, relax and smoke some cigarettes on your flight. And in fact, I think it was I think it was you that gave out Chesterfield cigarettes, like exclusively. There's like one of those fifties illustrations of a flight attendant walking around with a carton of chester Fields just holding it open for anybody who wants to come and grab a complimentary pack.
Amazing and gross.
And we'll get put a pin in that because more on smoking coming up, okay, because we're just going on a timeline here. Since we are on that timeline still, it is the nineteen fifties, air travel was booming for white Americans. And I say that because while airlines themselves were not segregated, a lot of the airports were, and you know, especially obviously in the South, they would usher black people into a different part of the airport, the facilities were not as good basically all but discouraging black Americans from plying. This started changing a little bit nineteen forties with the Washington National was the only federally owned airport, and the NAACP targeted them, you know, with protests and stuff, and the government since it was a federally owned airport and the only one had regulatory power, so they ended segregation at that airport in nineteen forty eight. But you know, it was all the way up until like the nineteen sixties when the DOJ started suing airports in the South by saying like, hey, the you know, the segregated part of your airport is no good and you're providing an inferior service and you can't do that.
Yeah, I saw Shreveport, Louisiana had the last airport in America to be desegregated, and that was in nineteen sixty three. We shouldn't have mentioned that last part yet, because we are going now to the jet age, and that really started in the fifties.
Yeah, we're jumping around the TIMELINEE.
Yeah, we are, we are. So there's a discrepancy about when the jet age exactly started. I think nineteen fifty eight was when the first commercially available jet service really kind of began to be widespread. But I know for a fact that the term jet set, which related specifically to wealthy people who flew around the world using jets, was coined in the early fifties by society columnist Igor Cassini, and so he either knew what was coming, or somehow the wealthy were using other jets I guess, maybe chartering them or something to fly around the world the fashionable parties, and that it wasn't until the fifties that less than uber wealthy people were able to start using jet travel.
Is it possible that jet had an alternate meaning no? So he predicted that nineteen forty eight would come along with the very first jet turbine engine in the Boeing seven oh.
Seven nineteen forty eight.
Fifty eight.
Yeah, you said forty eight, So yeah, I think that there were other jets, like there was the Havelin Comet predated the seven oh seven. I think the seven oh seven just made it so that you could carry more people, which meant that ticket prices were lower, which meant that the jet age really opened up for society at large.
And boy did it because that cut air travel in half. Basically, the transcontinental flight from New York to London went from fifteen hours to about seven on that seven oh seven, and it went up with people, you know, about one hundred and fifty to two hundred and twenty passengers, which was double what a DC seven could hold.
Up with people. The seven forty seven came along too. That really kind of helped expand and open up the jet travel for the average person because you could suddenly fit five hundred people in what was known as the Queen of the Skies, and you could fit five hundred people into a plane and still have for some swanky, swanky seventies lounges and bars that they used to build in the seven forty seven.
Oh, my friend, when you sent me that link, I love it.
What name the title of the article, at least so people can look up those pictures.
I know that it was on Executive Traveler and it was called Recalling the Fabulous Bars and Lounges of the Boeing seven forty seven.
Looking at those pictures does something to me that I can't explain.
I know exactly what to mean.
I don't know.
It's like the opposite of the wish of an airplane bathroom.
Yeah, it's the exact opposite. I don't know what it is.
That same lounge is fairly cool if it's just on the ground somewhere in someone's home. But those things, seeing people sitting around on those sofas and somebody playing the piano while they drink Martini's, it makes me crazy, crazy jealous.
Yeah, no, I know. Luckily people like Richard Branson came along you're like, you need to get these things back and so on. I don't know if Virgin's still around anymore or if they are. I think they kind of phased out some of their lounges, but there used to be bars on Virgin's airplanes. Yeah, and I know on Conder Air of the ways, they are known for having a pretty great bar on their airplanes. I think seven seventy sevens.
Yeah, I sat at one on that flight to Australia, so I have seen it and partaken in that situation.
It was in the seventies though, Yeah, I mean he did.
A fine job for modern airplanes and what a modern bar on an airplane might look like. But man, it ain't nothing like those old school ones. No, those were gorgeous.
I feel you. I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah, but it was too good to be true.
Those would not last long because they said, hey, you know what we get rid of that awesome cocktail piano bar lounge up there, we can put a lot more plane seats and flights will be cheaper.
And that was technically good for everybody.
I guess. So I think domestic flights in nineteen seventy are about what they cost today for adjusting for inflation, of course, But the international flights are where they really got you. A round trip ticket from nineteen in nineteen seventy from New York to London costs five grand. That's just a regular regular class ticket. You can get there today non stop on British airways for five hundred and eighty six dollars round trip. Really, so it definitely yeah, I looked it up. Their first class in some of the airlines starts for those trips at about five grand. But then also I think KLM has like a seventeen thousand dollars round trip first class ticket, so it definitely varies. But the just the regular class ticket where they put you in a cattle car cheek to jowl by your fellow passengers and toss you some Cheetos and say settle in for nine hours. That you can do that for five and eighty six dollars.
All right, not bad.
Frequent flyers back then in the sixties seventies were pretty much men flying for business, expensing it to the company and to try and get that business with the company. This is when you started getting the whole idea, the very outdated and misogynistic idea of like, hey, let's get these Let's get some good looking ladies in there, put them in little mini skirts and tell them to flirt with these businessmen.
Get them drunk and flirt with them.
Tell them that quote that Dave dug up.
Oh yeah, this is from this is from a woman who worked as an advertising exec in nineteen sixty seven that said, when it's our businessman gets on an airplane, we think he ought to be allowed to look at a pretty girl for God's sake, is what I think they cut off.
That was the That was just the general field, the zeitgeist for a long time. I mean, that's not like that went away, you know decades ago.
Oh no, for sure, Like, yeah, should probably take a break.
Huh yes, I think we should, chuck, I think we should. So let's do that.
We'll be right back, learn and stuff with Joshua Job stuff.
You shine up.
So we mentioned, you know, we got to talk about smoking. We mentioned these to handout packs of cigarettes literally at first thos Chesterfields, and that was just a thing where it was just it was looked at as this luxurious activity to sit back and smoke on a plane and just relax with your cigarette. And they encouraged smoking, like all the way up through the seventies, and it was a real problem for flight attendants, especially working. You know, there are reports and we may have even talked about this in the Flight Attendant episode where they couldn't even like see from one end of the plane to the other sometimes it was so thick with smoke.
Yeah, and jumping ahead in time, there was actually a class section lawsuit from American flight attendant it's not American Airlines, American like the United States. Yeah, the three hundred million dollar settlement from the tobacco industry because they've been exposed to cigarette smoke, whether they smoked or not. Some of them developed lung cancer from it and other maladies. And they won that, I think in nineteen ninety seven. But the reason that they won that in nineteen ninety seven is because they've been inhaling that from since the thirties essentially, but it really started to get bad. It seemed like it from the fifties to the seventies.
Oh yeah, for sure.
And if we're going on our timeline here, smoking sections came about in nineteen seventy one, which is, as Emily always says, that's like having a no peeing section in.
A pool not very effective.
And then beyond the smoke, people hanging their cigarettes out in the aisle, flight attends are literally getting burned like cigarette burns on the rag. Finally, in nineteen eighty seven, California, of course, said hey, if you're flying within our state, you're not smoking. In nineteen ninety federal regulation said no smoking if it's a six hour flight or less domestic flight, but if you're going for Miami to Seattle, you deserve to light up. And then Delta and God all the way into nineteen ninety five was the very first airline to say no more smoking.
Ever.
Yeah, I was among the last I smoked on an airplane legitimately, and I think it was in nineteen ninety five.
I love that story. It's very great.
Yeah, I was like, this is the smoking section. It's just some seats that are designated for the smokers to sit and there's no partition or anything like that. Yeah, it's weird looking back in retrospect, it's weird. But also one of the things that I didn't realize is that still today you'll see ashtrays on airplanes, and before it was like, oh, Okay, those are old airplanes and these are the ash trays from yesteryear, but you'll still see them on brand new airplanes. And the reason why is federal law to have an ash tray near the bathroom because even though you're not supposed to smoke on a plane, they want you to be able to put one out if you are the jerk who tries it anyway.
Yeah, so you don't cause a danger.
Yeah, because a fire on an airplane is not good.
Yeah, for sure.
And I know I mentioned it on past episodes, but I did take one flight, a smoking flight to Europe in I think ninety six or so, so internationally they were still smoking and it was just awful.
Yeah. This was to Amsterdam on KLM and I think nineteen ninety five that I smoked, and I smoked a lot.
Mine was too, buddy.
I really took full advantage of it because I knew it was in the air, that this is this is it, it was gonna it was going away, so I better smoke them while I got them.
Yeah, and you know, I smoked the occasional cigarette back then, but I don't know, I didn't have any desire to smoke on the plane.
Okay, well, I'm sorry if I blew you out with the smoke. No, no, no, that is what a jerk move. That is.
We were not on the same flight, but I did fly to Amsterdam as well, but I didn't smoke cigarettes on that flight anyway.
Food, yeah, because I mentioned that the like food was like like there would be a guy with a chef's hat carving ham next to your seat. It was like that. It wasn't always like that. They kind of came along in the Golden Age and the I think the thirties, the fifties really to the seventies. It started out that way, but that was back when you had six passengers. So they would make like a mignon of veal and Russian sauce on a DC three for United. They more often than not, I think, feed you during a refueling stop, because you mentioned how long it takes to get to Europe and the turboprop plane. That's not just the flying time, that's like landing and refueling time, and so they would often like set up tables in the hangar whatever and feed you like a pretty good meal while you were waiting for the refueling. That happened more often than feeding you a good meal in the early days on the plane.
Yeah, for sure, Pan American airlines would come along and develop that.
I know we talked about this on some episode.
They kind of predated the TV dinner and TV dinners kind of came from these airline meals where they had a little frozen meal and the little partition tray, and that was in nineteen forty six, and the TV dinners came along in the fifties.
But we mentioned that deregulation.
In seventy eight, Jimmy Carter signed that bill deregulating the US airline industry, and that that's when everything changed because for the first first time you have this price competition, and they were like, we can't afford this stuff. We're not going to start giving you know, we're not going to give out great food anymore. And you know it wasn't great but hot food.
They made the decision that people wanted cheaper tickets and less frills, that they valued a less expensive ticket than the experience of flying.
I was one of those people, by the way, I mean, they're.
Right, yeah, like people do value that, but at the time, there weren't really like budget air carriers. That's not true.
There were.
There was one I hadn't heard of called Laker Airways. Freddie Lake, a rich British guy, founded it and it was actually the world's first budget airfare airline. It predated Frontier and everybody. But for the most part, like these were like the major carriers who now were competing with other carriers who like It was just a huge, huge shakeup in the business. And what's funny is some of the biggest airlines were like, we don't want deregulation. It's going to do all sorts of terrible things. People are going to stop flying to k mark my words, I read like an editorial ad that it's like the kind that had a cartoon, like an editorial cartoon and like an article. But it was an ad taken out by Delta arguing against the regulation. And one of the things they predicted was that it would lead to airline consolidation, fewer choices, and in the end, higher ticket prices. And it turns out Delta was right. It just took a few decades because at first ticket prices went down, competition increased, there were more airlines that came out of nowhere, and entered the market and the consumer won out for a while. But then over time, as frills were cut more and more and the airlines looked to cut costs more and more, air travel just kind of became the living nightmare that it is today. Yeah, thanks to Jimmy Carter. I mean that was implied, but I just wanted to say it.
Well, I mean he signed the bill, who pushed it through? Do you know that?
Rosalind?
Okay?
Now, I remember even at the time, and still I'm like, I just want to get somewhere.
I don't.
I mean, if it's a really really long flight, I can appreciate the inflight service, but otherwise I'm like, just make it cheaper and just get us there and leave me alone. But what I think doesn't happen is they're not like, all right, we're going to cut out the in flight service and you won't believe how cheap the tickets are going to be. They would just be like, okay, now more for us exactly.
That was the knock on effective deregulation, and I ultimately became a disservice to the customer and ended up serving the airlines much more handsomely.
You ever have a bisk Off butter.
Yeah, I have, just straight out of the jar on a spoon. Mm hm, yes, I have. I like it, but I think I've had one too many bisk cough cookies. I can't eat them on the airplane anymore. I love them, They're good, but I just can't have them though. I'll tell you what I like. Are those little mustard pretzels?
Mmm? I don't like those.
Oh well, I'll trade you my book off for your mustard pretzels any day.
We're great seat mates, just cause book a cigarette in the back of the plane. So we're going to finish up with a couple of quick bits here in flight entertainment. That air Marine Airlines that we mentioned at the beginning that was said to put a pin in the first international flight from Key West to Cuba. They were the very first airline to show a movie too, because in nineteen twenty one they put up a sheet at the front of the cabin and put up a put up a projector and screened how Do Chicago for all eleven passengers.
And I was like, why would they show a movie called Howdy Chicago? Which turns out to be a short promotional film for the city of Chicago on a flight from Key West to Cuba. And it turns out it was not a flight to key West to Cuba. It was a flight around Chicago. So the whole thing was kind of like a promotional thing. But that was the first thing flight movie.
But still the same airline.
Yeah, same airline they were. They suddenly ended up in Chicago somehow.
Yeah, I gotcha.
And also, hold on, I want to correct myself real quick. I said the first discount airline was Laker Airways. That's actually not true. The very first discount airline was Pacific Southwest Airlines, which started flying cut rate seats in nineteen forty nine.
And is that what Southwest Airs is today?
I couldn't find that that's the case.
Now, Okay, so not the same company, No.
I think Southwest kind of was built out of scratch by a couple of Dallas oil meneh Okay.
In sixty one twa good old Transworld Airlines was the first to offer in flight movies.
This was.
I sort of remember these when they would just show the movie on a screen, a single screen.
Yeah, everybody watched the same movie together. It was kind of cool in that way.
It was kind of cool, and you know, depending on where you were, you could either see it or not see it. And then in the sixties is when they had the little overhead and I remember these too, the little overhead screens, not in the seatback that they were just up above you where the air conditioner and the light was.
Yeah.
I totally remember that as well. Again, it was a communal thing, like people would laugh out. It was like watching a movie in a theater, but on a plane. Yeah, I liked it. One of the things that was noteworthy about it, though, Chuck, is that you if you look at old pictures of people watching movies on planes, they look like they all have stethoscopes in their ears.
I remember those.
I do too, And I was like, why do I remember that? It's because so these are these are sound delivered through pneumatic tubes. It's not an electronic signal by any means. It's just basically an echo that you're hearing of the sound being broadcast through tubes that you're connected into. Delta didn't phase those out until two thousand and three. I remember them.
Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. And the little screen would fold down from the ceiling yep, and if you pinch that tube, the sound would go away.
I don't remember that part.
Yeah, you pinched the tube of your seat mate just to get at him.
Oh yeah, I don't remember that at all. Maybe you're not such a great seat made after that.
Oh, eight eighty eight was when the seatback screens finally came around with Northwest Airlines and Wi Fi in two thousand and three.
I believe it was British Airways and Luftanza were the first to give you Wi Fi. And now people are so so spoiled by all of that.
Yeah. And also it's evolved from the seatback screen to your tablet now, Like I've been on fights where it's like we don't have the screen, So you better have a tablet because right the way you're watching a movie pal and I man, I'll throw a temper tantrum and get kicked off a plane for that.
You don't bring a dumb tablet on a plane, No, Josh.
Clark, they show me the movies Chuck just before we finish here. Do you remember there's some defunct airlines? Do you remember Hooter Air? No, you don't remember Hooters Air?
I don't think so. Was it the restaurant, yes, but like.
An airline, and it flew to date. I think the hub was Daytona Beach appropriately enough. Of course I never flew it, but I was aware of it.
And I'm sure the flight attendants wore that outfit.
Right, Yes, like they could have just have stepped out of a Hooters. They wore the exact same outfit from what I remember.
Okay, Oh, you actually flew on it.
No, No, I don't. Okay, I said I was aware of it, and sorry, it was out of Myrtle Beach, not Daytona Beach. I was way off.
Oh okay, you know that does ring a little bit of a bell now that I think about it. And then earlier I remember the I think the first African American flight attendant worked for Mohawk Airline and she I remember Mohawk from Madmen.
Oh yeah, okay, I knew that sounded familiar somehow.
Yeah.
And then there was also value Jet you remember them?
Yeah? Sure, I flew with Value Jet a lot.
And of course Eastern Airlines that was a very big airline when we were kids.
Yeah, And there was a I cannot, for the life of me remember the name, which is sad because It was the first airline I was loyal with, and I think it might have been it might have been air Tran, which used to be Value Jet. It was air Tran, Yeah.
I remember air Tran.
They used to give you like a free like one way leg for like every four or five times you flew. It was astounding. It was the best loyalty program around. You would get upgraded at the drop of a hat, like in like everybody was super friendly. It was so great, and I think Delta absorbed them at some point. I think probably like the last fifteen twenty years, and air Trend went away. It was very sad for me.
Well, we are Delta loyalists, not to give them free advertising. But aside from my wrinkle before the Orlando show, they've always done right by me. But you know, shout out to Spirit in Frontier and Alaska Airlines and all the other smaller airlines because Jet Blue. I flew a lot of Jet Blue flights. Are they still around.
We've been on them. I don't know. I don't know. I want to shout out one more though, too. Midwest was a beloved airline out of think Milwaukee, and one of the greatest things about Midwest was that after the in flight meal, they would bake their chocolate chip cookies, and so the whole plane would fill with the smell of the most delicious chocolate chip cookies you've ever had in your life. They were so good. Yeah, and they went away. I can't remember who they merged with, but they very quickly were They did away with the cookies. They're like no costs Marry.
That tracks with my in laws, step and Charon have a story about a first class flight they took back in the day from Ohio where they baked the cookies.
So it must have been Midwest.
Well. The cool thing about Midwest is the whole thing was all one class. They had huge leather seats, the whole plane was that love. Everybody was treated like first class on Midwest.
I love it.
Yeah.
Down with the whatever what would you call that?
The cattle cars?
No, just classism, oh, classism.
Class classism, like everybody the same charge, everybody, the same charge, everyone two hundred dollars to go anywhere.
But give everybody first class treatment. That's that's the caveat.
Flying was still fairly reasonable up until I feel like you mean cost wise, Yeah, I feel like before COVID you could still get some pretty good deals. And then, boy, I think its just went berserk because I don't know, the airline industry got hit so hard.
But is it also greedflation? I have no idea.
I would say probably yes. I think the answer to most times you say is a greedflation is probably yes. Okay, Well, since I said that and Chuck laughed, of course, everybody, that means I just inadvertently triggered and stepped right into listener mail.
Yeah, this is a very sweet one from Lou.
We're thinking of Blue right now because Lou, in real time, this is just a few days ago, lost his childhood cat of twenty years. Even though she was old, I knew she wouldn't live forever. Doesn't make it any easier. When I got the news, my girlfriend was out that evening, so I was all alone to process it. After some crying and looking through old photos of Toots by the name is the Cat's name, I decided to seek out some comforting voices and resume your episode on Dumb Criminals.
So it was good for something. Guys.
I can't stress how much listening to the two of you joke around and chat about these daft stories helped cheer me up. At the start of the episode, one of you even said that you both had a tough week and you needed something silly, and listening to that app really helped cheer me up. You guys also helped me when my grandparents died within a few days of one another years ago. When I listened to your episode on how death works and in a weird way, it really helped me come to terms with what happened. We've heard about the death episode in grief a lot over the years, so we're proud of those. Hearing you guys discuss and explain death intelligently and an easy to digest way, intersperse with moments of levity and seriousness when appropriate really helped me at the time. So I wanted to say thank you. You guys mean a lot to a lot of people. All the best and that is from Lou.
Awesome, thanks, Lou, appreciate it. Sorry to hear about Toots.
Yeah, and Lou did not include pictures of Toots initially, and I said, Lou, you got to send me some photos. And Toots was a beautiful, beautiful, silly little girl.
Toots.
There's one of Toots kick back in a chair with her legs spread with a seemingly holding a remote control on the couch.
Awesome kind of sitting up straight. It was very very cute.
Well, Rip Toots and thanks again to Lou for emailing us. And if you want to be like Lou, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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