Come Fly With Me?

 

“ Let's fly, let's fly away”  Very few people of my generation are not familiar with the opening lines of Jimmy Van Heusen’s and Sammy Cahn’s popular 1958 pop hit made famous by Frank Sinatra.  The song was later featured in the 1963 eponymous film in which it was performed by Frankie Avalon.  Bobby Darren and many others have covered it right up to the present day.   Remember when flying was an adventure, something one looked forward to with anticipation?  It was something to be enjoyed before deregulation and the so-called “democratization” the airline industry when everything began to go to hell.  It’s never been the same since

I flew commercially for the first time during the spring of 1964, a flight on a Northwest Orient Airlines DC-7 four-engine turboprop from Atlanta to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.  I grew up in a family familiar with commercial aviation.  My mother had worked for the now-defunct Eastern Airlines at the Atlanta airport in the late 1940s when my father was a graduate student at Georgia Tech and before they moved to Chicago where I was born a short time later.  My dad worked for a time as a consulting engineer and we would make twice weekly trips to the nearest airport on a Sunday afternoon to see him off, and again on Friday evening, when he returned home for the weekend.  At the time of my first flight commercial jets were beginning to replace piston-driven aircraft.  The last commercial DC-7 operated by Northwest Orient left service in 1968.

It was a memorable first flight.  Imagine . . . a trip on a major commercial flight with a capacity of only 70 passengers.  Two seats on each side of a wide aisle, some of them facing each other with a table in between.  The seats were spacious and there was plenty of leg room and space to get up, stretch, and move about.  The flight attendants . . . called “stewardesses” back then . . . all seemed to be young and attractive and decked out in crisp uniforms and a hat.  Some even wore white gloves!  They served proper meals.  They would bring the salad and entrees on a rolling cart down the aisle and serve your choices on regular china with metal utensils and a folded cloth napkin with individual salt and pepper dispensers.    None of these pre-cooked, pre-wrapped meals served in plastic dishes and trays with wrapped plastic utensils and a flimsy paper napkin . . . if a meal is served at all.  A good friend of mine recently flew from San Francisco to Washington with no food service.  Often one is lucky to get a tiny bag of nuts or pretzels.  

Imagine there was a time when people actually dressed up to fly.  Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was in college, I would wear a jacket and tie when flying between Tampa and Chicago on trips home for the holidays.  I can’t even wrap my head around this idea now.  Why bother when passengers are crammed into ever smaller spaces with fewer if any amenities?  Often one must pay for these as well as for the privilege of checking one’s luggage.  Because of this there is more demand for what little space is available for carry on luggage.  Remember when overhead bins were for blankets and pillows for the passengers’ comfort?  More often than not they are now packed tight with bags and one is forced to store what does not fit under the seat in front where one’s legs usually go.

And what about the growing hassle at the airport before boarding a flight?  Long check-in lines followed by security checks where one is often treated as a criminal just for the audacity of wanting to fly.  And now there are the added requirements of vaccinations, a test to determine if one has COVID, and the mandatory wearing of masks.  How is it possible to be in a good frame of mind before boarding a crowded flight?  I just want to get where I am going as quickly as possible. 

“Come fly with me, let's take off in the blue.”   Yeah, right.  No thanks.  Fuck the friendly skies!