ONCE UPON A TIME

(Review appeared in the May 15, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal)
Even Coach Was Nice
Recalling an airline era when the skies really were friendly "Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience" By Daniel L. Rust University of Oklahoma, 259 pages, $45
Once upon a time, traveling by air was fun. Passengers dressed in their Sunday finery. They were able to board their flights without disrobing at security checkpoints, and meals were still served on china with real silverware, including knives. In "Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience," Daniel L. Rust traces transcontinental airline travel from its earliest days, when hopping into an airplane was considered a feat of bravery. Mr. Rust has assembled an impressive collection of illustrations, photographs and vintage airline advertisements, as well as first-hand accounts of passengers, to give readers a taste of airline travel through its evolution from being a novelty for a select few to a necessary nuisance for millions. During the glory years of airline travel, from roughly the mid-1940s until well into the 1970s, planes were filled with well-dressed passengers who could count on amenities such as sleeping berths with fresh white linens on long flights. The first attempts at flying passengers on transcontinental routes, though, were more focused on pushing the bounds of technology than they were about providing comfortable service. The U.S. government was interested in speeding up the mail by loading the most urgent parcels onto airplanes; passengers were largely an afterthought. Western Air Express, a predecessor of what would become Trans World Airlines, was among the first to start flying passengers on a regular basis. "Seated on two removable seats or on mail sacks in an open cockpit, hardy passengers braved deafening noise and whatever Mother Nature served up," Mr. Rust writes of the first 200 or so "intrepid souls" who flew in 1926. During the early years, the biggest obstacle to air transportation was fear and suspicion. Fledgling airlines turned to influential passengers, such as humorist Will Rogers, to bolster public confidence. Rogers wrote a two-part article in 1928 for the Saturday Evening Post, detailing his adventures on a trip from Los Angeles to New York and back that required multiple airplanes and multiple stops. During his flight, the pilot passed notes back to Rogers, pointing out landmarks along the way. One of Rogers's favorite moments was flying over a big city after sundown. "Daytime is like slumming compared to seeing a big, lighted city from the air at night," he wrote. (Rogers would die in 1935 in the crash of a small airplane while flying in Alaska with his friend, adventurer Wiley Post.) “What was once available to only the wealthiest adventure seekers has now become affordable to most Americans, who now give as much thought to riding an airplane across the continent as they once did to taking a subway or bus ride downtown.” Read an excerpt of "Flying Across America" Some of the most compelling anecdotes in "Flying Across America" are accounts from the early days of transcontinental travel, when propeller-driven airplanes plied low-altitude routes through all types of weather. One passenger, Marcia Davenport, wrote about a notoriously rough flight over the deserts of Southern California: "When a plane drops like a bullet, sometimes a hundred feet, your eyes google, you clutch the arm of your chair, and if you have time to watch your fellow passengers, you see them doing the same." Mr. Rust notes that in the early days, roughly 80% of the passengers on TWA flights over the Southwest suffered from air sickness. In addition to tracing the development of air travel, Mr. Rust includes brief histories of the airlines and companies such as Boeing Co., Lockheed and Douglas Aircraft, which spent 40 years in battle to develop a series of airplanes that eventually resulted in those used today. While the advent of the jet age in the 1950s brought the comfort of high-altitude travel and reduced a cross-country flight from 36 hours to around five hours, it also took away some of the romance. Landscapes that prompted passengers to rush from one side of the plane to the other for a glimpse became pastel blurs that, often as not, were obscured by low-level clouds. With the reduced flying time afforded by jet travel, airlines did not abandon their custom of providing food for passengers -- a practice that had begun when a long-distance journey meant several stops and many hours in the air. In fact, in the 1960s and into the 1970s, airlines competed to provide the highest quality meals. It was an era of high-altitude dining, the author writes, that culminated "in first-class, with flight attendants carving slices of hot roast beef right before the passengers' eyes." The book reprints a photo from the 1970s showing dinner being served to two couples -- the men in suits, the women in dresses -- at a round-top table covered in a white tablecloth on a TWA Lockheed L-1011 Tristar jetliner. A smiling stewardess stands beside them holding a wicker basket filled with bottles of wine. But as Mr. Rust notes, "the scene soon succumbed to the installation of additional seats to earn the airline more revenue." Done in a coffee-table format, "Flying Across America" is best read in short sections. In his efforts to pile several years of research into one place, Mr. Rust has thrown in everything from the history of air mail to details on the evolution of food and baggage service. After more than a few minutes, the information begins to feel unwieldy and a bit disorganized. Readers may also notice that Mr. Rust devotes little of his attention toward more recent events in air travel. For example, he doesn't introduce the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 -- and the flourishing of competition that it prompted -- until just a few pages before the end of the book. The rise of Europe's Airbus (which now builds the A380, the largest passenger jet in history) and of Southwest Airlines, which played a major role in bringing cross-country travel to the masses over the past 30 years, are relegated almost to footnote status. Mr. Rust concludes his history with a quick nod toward the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the resulting effects on air travel. Noting that "much of the glamour, the mystique, and the innocent excitement of air travel has been lost," he reiterates that transcontinental air travel has become "smoother than trips taken in most cars." But at least on a car trip, you're not forced beforehand to remove your shoes in the driveway.