A reminder that the glory days of post war air travel were also noisy, dirty and slow comes from a US reader.
He points out that while the aircraft were spacious, and the service on board was gracious, the carriers flew from large sheds like the Atlanta terminal shown below, where a LIFE magazine photographer recorded [...]
Tag Archives: The Past
Peak hour for propellers
September 28, 2009 – 8:04 pm
She left on a jet plane
September 22, 2009 – 8:23 am
Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, has died of leukemia.
Her song, Leaving on a Jet Plane, was one of the memorable ballads of the 60s.
It was a time of ideas, issues, campaigns, marches, and thanks to the early jet age, of mobility.
Please enjoy the music and wish goodbye to [...]
What is really remarkable about this airliner?
September 3, 2009 – 8:17 pm
The recent item about Clara Adams, the original frequent flyer, caused the doors to the vault of historic airline exhibits to spring open. A reader sent a link to this collection of images from the early years of jet airliners on Vacation.com and comprising mainly images and few details, it included some surprises.
And [...]
Clara Adams-The original frequent first flyer
August 31, 2009 – 9:01 pm
Is this the world’s original frequent flyer, and collector of historic first flights?
Her name is Clara Adams, 1884-1971, a rich pre-war widow whose collection of aviation memorabilia is held in the McDermott Library in the University of Texas-Dallas.
And these examples of that collection have been sent to us by a reader interested in our [...]
The Past-A war time diary by a B-17 navigator
August 14, 2009 – 11:36 am
A mission by mission account of flying and surviving as the navigator on a B-17 in WWII is being circulated on-line at a range of sites.
Joel Punches’ account is a shock at a number of levels, including his observations of daily life in the UK at war, which starts with a delivery flight across the [...]
The Fast Past-A Lockheed Blackbird slide show
August 8, 2009 – 7:02 pm
Since a message from Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson was conveyed to us on the Lockheed JSF we have received a link to what we believe to be part of a memoir of a surviving member of the group of the 93 pilots to fly the SR-71.
It comes in the form of a flash slide [...]
50 years ago today the jet age came to Australia
July 29, 2009 – 2:16 pm
This afternoon 50 years ago saw the start of the jet age for passengers in Australia, and on the Pacific.
Qantas flight EM774, a Qantas 707-138 took off at 3.35 pm on 29 July 1959 for San Francisco via Nadi and Honolulu, and made the trip in only 14 hours 57 minutes.
It was the beginning of [...]
The Past-Pan Am flight 123 and the North Pole
July 15, 2009 – 9:00 am
It is not just 40 years since the first manned flight to the moon, but also the advent of commercial INS or inertial navigation systems in scheduled airline service.
To complete the process of certification in 1969 however a passenger carrying flight had to be made, and Pan American World Airways decided to ‘divert’ a London-Seattle [...]
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