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Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
The glamour of the jet age is gone, and that's a shame. It's time to bring back the wonder.
Jun 21, 2002 | I remember, as a kid and an airplane buff in the mid-1970s, when passengers still broke out in applause at every smooth landing. Sure, by this point the era of white-clad stewards and flying boats was a relic of decades past, while the glitz and excitement of the jet age had long disappeared, but travel by plane still clung to a sort of delusional esteem. Nowadays, rarely do you come across an American who has never flown in an airplane, and we've come to treat flying with ho-hum embrace as yet another impressive but ultimately uninspiring technological realm.
If one could choose a single point at which the thrill and the glamour of flying were at last rendered quaintly obsolete, the doors of the terminals flung open to the proverbial unwashed, it would have to be the moment when, in the fall of 1978, President Jimmy Carter put his name on the Airline Deregulation Act. Prior to this moment, even with tarmacs growing crowded with widebodies and leg room shrinking away, it still was possible to find vestiges of, in the words of author James Kaplan, "the days when people climbed those moveable staircases to get into silver skinned planes. Before the days when international airports would be jam-packed with Swedish kids with shorts and backpacks."
In the years to come, deregulation would unleash a wave of upstart airlines. Most were doomed to failure or corporate absorption (think People Express, New York Air, Air Florida), but nonetheless they collectively invaded what was once the coveted territory of the well-dressed businessman or bourgeois tourist, fatally mugging a token or two of the entrenched establishment in the process (think unfortunate Luddites like Braniff and Pan Am).
Where would Southwest Airlines, a former niche player whose route system barely breached the confines of Texas, be today without this late-'70s revolution? Today, for 69 bucks, college kids and retirees can hop a Southwest jet from St. Louis to Tampa, Providence to Baltimore. And wasn't this, after all, the point? How very egalitarian. What a symbol of freedom, as Southwest's schmaltzy television ads so incessantly remind us.
The trouble is, not only did flying become cheaper and more accessible, but it became immensely more uncomfortable and tedious, prone to all the breakdown and hassle one might have expected when 250 million people suddenly have free run at a particular infrastructure.
The going cliché, as concourses grow more crowded and profit margins slimmer, is a frustrated comparison of the airport terminal to the downtown bus station. How much longer before air travelers have to endure the same dreary disrepair and stained seatbacks of the Greyhound depot? Today, to properly savor the irony here, a passenger need only pay a visit to Boston's renovated South Station, for example, with its polished granite floors and elegant skylights, and then take a walk through Terminal C at Logan International.
Most people in 2002 do not enjoy flying; not because of inherent danger aloft, but because planes are uncomfortable and airports chaotic. This is the ultimate realization, perhaps, of a fully evolved technology, whereby flying itself has become secondary to the experience as a whole.
Here I am, sitting in a Boeing 747, a plane that, if it were tipped onto its nose, would rise as tall as a 20-story office tower. I'm at 33,000 feet over the middle of the Pacific Ocean traveling at 600 miles per hour, en route to the Far East, a voyage that once took seven weeks in a sailing ship. And what are the 400 passengers doing? Complaining, sulking, reading the paper and tapping grumbly rants into their laptops. The man next to me, having paid a $5,600 business class fare, is upset because there's a dent in the lip of his can of ginger ale.
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