Was air travel better in the golden past?
Flying used to be better in the good old days, right? Wrong, say some commentators.
“The Golden Age has never existed,” said former Virginia Gov. Gerald Baliles, who led a presidential commission in the early 1990s to revitalize the US 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.”
Some Congressmen are again looking at restoring some of the government supervision of the airlines in the “golden age,” but the Wall Street Journal’s Scott McCartney writes that in the “good old days: air travel was expensive, noisy and crash-prone.”
Loren Steffy in the Houston Chronicle also pointed out the negatives, writing:
“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 US$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, Steffy says.
“Regulation also resulted in limited flights, often requiring multiple stops for a trans-continental trip. At the same time, hijackings became increasingly frequent in the late 1960s,” Steffy wrote.
Steffey’s own family moved to Cyprus in 1972, and he remembers worrying before boarding the Pan Am 707 about the plane being hijacked to Cuba.
From 1964 to 1973, there was an average of seven fatal accidents a year on US. airlines. The fatal accident rate per departure in 1969 was 13 times higher than in 2009.
“Now, it’s just another form of mass transit,” concludes the columnist. ”As bad as things may seem now, the good ol’ days weren’t that great, either.”
By David Wilkening
David
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