This article is but one example of a tiresome genre: the paean to the supposed glory days of aviation. Passengers dressed up, dined on caviar, and smoked cigarettes. Stewardesses were sexy, and liquor flowed in the expansive 747 lounge.
These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks.
I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me.
But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account.
Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.
I think the context that's missing from this discussion is just how long the 747 was in service. When it was new, pilots didn't directly control the engines - a flight engineer did. There were no moving maps and navigation was done with radio beacons and pilotage (of course, this required lots of fiddling with knobs and a notepad). There were no flight envelope protections, and we knew next to nothing about the dangers of rocketing across the ocean at Mach 0.9. The first encounter between a jetliner and volcanic ash was a 747; despite all four engines flaming out and the whole plane being wreathed in St. Elmo's fire, the pilots were able to safely restart all of them and nobody got hurt. People who love this jet love it because they see the problems it solved and how it kept on rising to the occasion as the world changed around it.
I'm not going to pay 2x ticket prices to keep it alive either, but it is terribly romantic. If human beings are allowed to fall in love with machines this one is as good as any.
And the context of the different regulatory environment. Those fancy cabins in the 60s/70s were because prices/routes were controlled by government. Unable to compete on price, airlines competed on luxury. Which, at the time, largely boiled down to who which had the shortest miniskirts in the TV ads.
Today's flying cattlecar hell is the result of the opposite, a dramatic market-driven race to the bottom of quality... followed by a price bounce to see how much money they can pull out of use before we give up and drive.
The day we have self-driving cars good enough that we can sleep, domestic air travel is dead. Ill take 10 hours curlled up in the back seat of my car rather than the 10+ hours it takes getting to/from airports for a domestic flight.
Seriously it is embarrassing how under developed trains are in the US. Yes there are some routes that don’t make sense but there are tons that do. It makes no sense. We’ve simply resigned to this general feeling of “well everything is probably too far apart and even if they aren’t it’s just not going to happen.”
there is a large, well connected domestic auto industry that wants Americans to keep driving bigger and more gas guzzling cars because that's the only thing they know how to sell to Americans these days.
Though this is not really limited to the legacy automakers; the Hyperloop was a media stunt to try and divert investment away from transit, and in some places, it actually worked.
Trains will also be killed by fully autonomous cars. Trains still need stations, loading times, tickets, horrible food, waiting in lobbies, luggage limits, government ID ... check in. Trains are literally unable to ever deliver door-to-door transport. And, in north america, biulding tens of thousands of stations (one in every small town) plus millions of miles of track ... it just isnt going to happen in our lifetimes.
Train travel is not this horrible experience you’re implying. When I’m in DC I swipe a card, walk on, walk off. Same with New York and Amsterdam. Even Netherlands into France is walk on/walk off - they recommend you get there 20min early. Luggage limits? First off, how often do you need to haul multiple suitcases and bags? Even then, I have walked on to trains with multiple suitcases. It is definitely not a big deal. This reads to me like how whenever bikes come up suddenly everyone has to haul a refrigerator uphill in the rain.
Autonomous cars would absolutely be the most convenient, comfortable experience. But it is incredibly inefficient/wasteful and it will never be economical. Trains are a great way to travel. Also, how far are you expecting autonomous cars to take you? I can’t imagine it’s economical after more than a couple of miles. It’s certainly wasteful out the gate because everyone expects to have their own cars in the US in particular. And not everything needs to be door to door, nor do we need trains for literally every town in the US. These are all absurd bars you’re setting that no one is calling for. You’re basically saying “trains aren’t luxurious enough for me and don’t go literally everywhere so therefore they should be killed.”
There’s also the wrinkle that we keep being promised they’re about to be here and yet we’ve seen very minimal deployment of any kind so far. I just don’t think personal, autonomous cars are going to be here in any reasonable timeframe, if for no other reason then how litigious the US is, and trains are just far more efficient at the end of the day for most cases.
Edit: forgot the food and waiting around… at least you have food available to you at a train station. If you’re in a car stuck in traffic, you just have to grin and bear it with no options. There’s also nothing stopping you from packing your own food, while eating in a vehicle isn’t yours is generally frowned upon in a car.
> When I’m in DC I swipe a card, walk on, walk off. Same with New York and Amsterdam. Even Netherlands into France is walk on/walk off
What train did you take to France? Everytime I go to Belgium I have to be careful to pick a train that doesn't require me to book a ticket on a specific train. I really like the "I'll get the next train whenever I reach the station" that domestic trains have. For long distance international trains that seems to only still be available to a limited set of trains to Belgium.
Eurostar. Buy tickets online, walk up to gate, QR code beeps on a little scanner, walk onto train. That was it. No TSA-like security experience, no person checking anything (except one guy who walked around on the train and scanned one ticket which registered all our tickets at once, pretty uneventful). UK is a notable exception but they’re also kind of insane about government surveillance/security, especially post-brexit. Also not EU.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to require you to buy tickets ahead of time when you’re going to other countries. All travel requires this and taking autonomous cars across countries is generally not a realistic option nor will it be except in edge cases (and for deep pockets).
Anyway point is daily train travel is generally easy and affordable. It’s not this grueling, burdensome process in places that have actually invested in it. It can be a great way to move lots of people consistently, and a lot of the US would benefit from it. Sooo many cities with crazy traffic between them forcing what should be a 30-60min trip into hours. A train would rip between these places.
Daily commuter trains between Austin/dallas/Houston for instance would be great. Austin to Dallas is a 3-4hr drive. A TGV, decades old tech, would do it in 60min flat. Could you imagine?
The Channel Tunnel has security checks because it's a 30km undersea tunnel, and separates an island country with a different approach to weapons to its neighbour. There are no security checks on any other trains in the UK.
It's also not necessary (in Europe) to buy tickets any differently when crossing borders. Advance-purchase tickets are used for long-distance high-speed trains where they don't want people sitting, or wish to spread the demand throughout the day to avoid crowding — that applies whether or not a border is crossed.
I can buy a ticket (paper or electronic) moments before the train from Copenhagen to Malmö leaves, since it's a medium-distance regional train without reserved seating.
Sure, but when the 747 was new and gas was a few cents a gallon?
An airplane is a very efficient way to move people. There is no ground friction, the route is pretty direct, and once the airplane is loaded 100 passenger-miles a gallon is not unreasonable.
Even today the EU has to ban short-haul flights along rail corridors because jets are still competitive. I say this as someone who likes trains and chooses them whenever possible.
Yes, because airports and everything around is heavily subsidized and there is no tax on jet fuel.
"There is no ground friction"
And that argument is not so strong considering that air friction grows quadratic with speed.
And considering side effects like climate change - contrails combined with lots of other chemicals in the jet fuel are really not helping, their effect is worse than just the CO2 released which is also already huge.
So high speed trains are superior in almost every way - once a rail network is build. That is the advantage of planes - they just require start and landing strip.
I cannot fathom why you think airport subsidies matter here. Airports are way, way cheaper than HSR.
Yeah drag grows quadratically with speed but reduces with altitude. At 40k ft a modern jet delivers up to 150 pmpg.
Yes the carbon emissions argument is a good one, and I personally prefer taking trains when they're available. I think that people are not appreciative enough of how efficient air travel is.
I just don’t understand how anybody can take a domestic flight and go “yeah, that sounds way better than a train.“ Even the worst train experience is better than a midtier plane experience. Plus unless you’re traveling particularly far, once you factor in all the nonsense of getting to an airport, through security, then out of the airport when you arrive, train is often the faster method.
I don’t need a plane to travel 1-10mi and long distance trains are on the whole far more pleasant than domestic flights. Plus you don’t have to get there 90min-2hr early to go through invasive security theater.
I bet if you pay the equivalent 60s/70s dollars to fly today you'll get much better service than back then! Modern first class cabins are a class above what was available back then.
For the money things have actually got better. If you pay the equivalent (adjusted for inflation or compared to wages) of what they were paying back then for an international flight, you're in first class and on a good airline that's hugely better than anything from the 'golden age'. Even business class is cheaper and (again on good airlines) is better than what people had then - the planes are quieter, the seats lie flat, the food is good, lounge access with free food and drinks before and on any stopovers...
It's kind of crazy that people compare the experience on a $1000 transalantic ticket and bemoan that the experience doesn't seem quite as good as something that was costing people the equivalent of 10-20x as much back then!
But still, I have a soft spot for the Golden ages of engineering well before my time - like many, I'm an apollo program geek. No matter how many documentaries I watch, books I read, websites I peruse, schematics I try to figure out, it is still beyond astonishing to me that we flew to the moon with 60s technology. I'll continue reading about it for rest of my life and be incorrectly melancholic about the simpler days of engineering :).
While the 747 isn't my kink, it'd adjexent enough thay I think I can understand it - I imagine it's similarly fascinating to think of massive intercontinental airplane designed by slide rule , then flown across Atlantic without computers or gps or ils or any other amenities.
More expensive and breakable and inefficient and polluting and just insane as it also may have been :)
This is a disappointingly cynical take. Sure, it's fine to criticize some of the specifics of this particular article, but the 747 was an engineering marvel for its time, and it was one of the major workhorses of commercial (and in some cases, non-commercial) aviation for a very long time.
We're allowed to be nostalgic for it. I, like you, benefit from the modern age. I never even flew on a plane until I was 19 years old, in 2001, so I never experienced those so-called "glory days". But I think it's important to think about and memorialize those times.
Smoking is bad. Objectifying stewardesses is bad. The whole "fancy party" type atmosphere of those days feels quaint and elitist now. The 747 itself isn't a great plane by today's standards, on several metrics.
But that's fine. We can appreciate it for what it was in its time, and celebrate an aircraft that put in so many hours and miles of service.
I hear you, but I do think you are in the minority here. It is human nature to imagine themselves being fabulously wealthy and belonging to the 1% or the 0.1%, and therefore enjoying the privileges of this rarefied club. Such paeans to the glory days of aviation is the same as the glory days of railroading (traveling in your private rail car across country) and the same as the owning and enjoying a trip on your own yacht. Most people are fascinated by the act of fantasizing themselves being so filthy rich in a different era.
Function over form, or form over function? The endless debate.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you but I understand the merits in cherishing “form” in a world that is - for the most part - devoid of beauty and taste.
The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.
We would all have been better off if Boeing had replaced the 737 with the 757 as intended. Its quieter, more comfortable, and a better aircraft all around.
They were limited by the tech of the time too. A modern clean sheet redesign of a 747/A380 class airplane would look very different given modern composites and improvements in engine bypass and compression ratio.
These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks.
I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me.
But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account.
Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.