Made In America - Bill Bryson [212]
TAT lost almost $3 million in its first year and was taken over by Western Air Express, which itself evolved into Transcontinental and Western Air – TWA. (The name Trans World Airlines was the product of a later, more expansive age.) Within a year, it had slashed the one-way fare to just $160 (though there were no more free pens) and introduced the first stewardess. (Her name was Ellen Church and she chose the job title herself.)
On 21 October 1936, just nine years after Lindbergh’s daring flight, Pan Am inaugurated regular passenger flights across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila, with refuelling stops at Honolulu, Midway, Wake and Guam. Three years later, the airline also offered the first scheduled flights across the Atlantic, to Marseilles via the Azores and Lisbon, aboard its Flying Clippers, four-engine, twenty-two-passenger Boeing flying boats. Ocean flights inspired an ominous new term, point of no return, which first appeared in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautics Society in 1941, and quickly moved into the language in various figurative senses.
The logistics of Pan Am’s Pacific operations were formidable. Wake and Midway were uninhabited, so everything needed on the islands, from pancake batter to spare engines, had to be shipped in. Three complete hotels were built in San Francisco, dismantled, shipped to Midway, Wake and Guam, and there reassembled. By September 1940, Pan Am had extended its Pacific operations, and was advertising flights to New Zealand in just four and a half days. If pressed for time, travellers could instead settle for Midway – ‘an ideal choice for those who seek a restful, carefree South Seas atmosphere’ – which could be reached in just two days. What the advertisements didn’t say was that Midway was a desolate heap of sand and that the few lonely people stationed there spent most of their time shooting rats. In any case, a little over two years later, Midway became a rather less desirable holiday spot when it became the focus of the first great battle of the war in the Pacific.
Despite the risks and discomfort, the number of airline passengers soared. Between 1930 and 1940 the number of air travellers went from 417,000 to over 3 million.12 World War II naturally acted as a brake on the growth of the airlines, but it also had the benefit of producing huge advances in longdistance aviation, which the airlines were quick to exploit with the return of peacetime. By 1947 Northwest Orient Airlines was boasting a flying time from Chicago to Shanghai of forty-one hours, and from New York to Tokyo of just thirty-nine hours, on its wondrous Stratocruisers, which offered every comfort. Because hotel stops were no longer necessary, they came equipped with beds known, almost inevitably, as Skysleepers. Six years later Pan Am introduced transatlantic jet services, and beds became a thing of the past as the faithful Stratocruiser gave way to the Boeing 707. Instead of names, planes increasingly had numbers – a not insignificant loss to the romance of air travel. (Having said that, Boeing had used numbers since its first commercial plane, the 247, which carried just ten passengers.)
Jet travel sprinkled the language with new words: jet-hop (1952), jetport (1953), jet set (1960), jet lag (1966), and jet fatigue and jet syndrome (alternative words for the more durable jet lag, both coined in 1968). Also in 1968 came an entirely new type of passenger plane named for, of all things, a circus elephant that had lived a century earlier. I refer of course to the jumbo jet.
The jumbo became a feature of travel when introduced into service by Pan Am on 21 January 1970. (The first flight, from Kennedy Airport to Heathrow, took off seven and a half hours late because of an engine problem.) The plane’s formal name was the Boeing 747, so called because ever since the 707, Boeing’s jetliners had been numbered in increments of ten in the order in which they came off the drawing-board. Interestingly, the feature that makes the jumbo instantly