What the 'golden age' of flying was really like
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Cocktail lounges, five course meals, caviar served from ice sculptures and an endless flow of champagne: life on board airplanes was quite different during the "golden age of travel," the period from the 1950s to the 1970s that is fondly remembered for its glamor and luxury.
It coincided with the dawn of the jet age, ushered in by aircraft like the de Havilland Comet, the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8, which were used in the 1950s for the first scheduled transatlantic services, before the introduction of the Queen of the Skies, the Boeing 747, in 1970. So what was it actually like to be there?
"Air travel at that time was something special," says Graham M. Simons, an aviation historian and author. "It was luxurious. It was smooth. It was fast.
"People dressed up because of it. The staff was literally wearing haute couture uniforms. And there was much more space: seat pitch -- that's the distance between the seats on the aircraft -- was probably 36 to 40 inches. Now it's down to 28, as they cram more and more people on board."
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The airline most often associated with the golden age of travel is Pan Am, the first operator of the Boeing 707 and 747 and the industry leader on transoceanic routes at the time.
"My job with Pan Am was an adventure from the very day I started," says Joan Policastro, a former flight attendant who worked with the airline from 1968 until its dissolution in 1991.
"There was no comparison between flying for Pan Am and any other airline. They all looked up to it.
"The food was spectacular and service was impeccable. We had ice swans in first class that we'd serve the caviar from, and Maxim's of Paris [a renowned French restaurant] catered our food.
Policastro recalls how passengers would come to a lounge in front of first class "to sit and chat" after the meal service.
"A lot of times, that's where we sat too, chatting with our passengers. Today, passengers don't even pay attention to who's on the airplane, but back then, it was a much more social and polite experience," says Policastro, who worked as a flight attendant with Delta before retiring in 2019.
Suzy Smith, who was also a flight attendant with Pan Am starting in 1967, also remembers sharing moments with passengers in the lounge, including celebrities like actors Vincent Price and Raquel Welch, anchorman Walter Cronkite and the Princess Grace of Monaco.
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Cocktail lounges, five course meals, caviar and an endless flow of champagne: life on board airplanes was quite different during the "golden age of travel," the period from the 1950s to the 1970s that is fondly remembered for its glamor and luxury.
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