‘Flying is not yet quite like hopping on a bus – but within 10 years it will be,’ reckoned the Observer Magazine of 26 March 1967, as it considered ‘the new horizons of the airborne age’ in which ‘we’ll be able to holiday cheaply in Kenya, weekend in Australia’.
In an unsurprisingly sexist lineup of 11 air hostesses (‘Spot your air girl’ was news of a different kind of air miles): ‘A recent experiment with a pedometer showed that an Air India hostess walked 9.5 miles up and down the aisle during the flight from London to New York and back.’
Meanwhile, Braniff airlines made its hostesses change costume as they passed through every longitude from New York to Latin America. ‘The next step – bunny hostesses – seems inevitable,’ said the writer.
A Q&A section explained why passengers are only forbidden to smoke at takeoff and on landing: ‘Burning cigarettes could ignite fuel vapour in a crash landing. In an emergency at cruising height, there would be time to put them out.’ An emergency such as, say, a fire caused by a lit cigarette? There was also this reassuring explanation for why first-class passengers are in the front – ‘they’re considered less likely than mere tourists to go berserk and shoot the pilot’.
Then there’s the station superintendent for the Isle of Barra, in the Hebrides, where the landing strip is the beach, who made sure the runway was clear of sheep and donkeys. ‘Passengers make their own tea in the air terminal (a wooden shed), and leave the money in a biscuit tin.’ Something that those flying from London to Paris can only dream of apparently, it being ‘impossible to get a cup of tea’.
Prophetically, the report continued: ‘Nevertheless it seems likely that if faced with the choice of higher fares or less comfort, the majority of tourist passengers would vote with their pocketbooks.’ EasyJet, here we come!
