The Airplane - Jay Spenser [121]
For help, Boeing turned to Walter Dorwin Teague, one of America’s premier industrial designers.
The U.S. industrial design movement arose in the 1930s to bring order to a world assailed by fast-changing technology. Influenced by streamlining and Art Deco styling, this school’s leaders—Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfus, and of course Teague—applied the creative imagination of the artist to a spectrum of products ranging from box cameras to cash registers to telephones. In the process of making them better, they defined the clean, progressive look of the decade.
Boeing’s request presented Teague and his staff with an unprecedented challenge. The mission of industrial design was to bring simplicity and beauty to manufactured goods, and in the process render them intuitive to use—a quality Teague called evident rightness. Could this be done with an airplane?
The Teague team moved to Seattle and labored side by side with Boeing engineers for six months. The result was an interior that set new standards of elegance for air travel. In that era before high-density seating, the luxurious cabin offered large seats that converted at night into lower berths. Above were Pullman-style upper berths that folded down to open. All of these were curtained off, providing passengers with privacy after they had brushed their teeth and changed into pajamas in the plane’s large gold-hued dressing rooms.
For those wishing to stay up and talk, a spiral staircase wound down to a lower lounge complete with bar, windows, a mirrored end wall, and wraparound seating for up to fourteen people. So popular was this cocktail lounge that it kept Stratocruisers in service long after their high operating costs might otherwise have warranted.
Beginning in the late 1940s, airlines introduced coach services as an economical alternative to first-class travel. High-density seating let airlines carry more travelers. While it brought lower ticket prices and a relative democratization of flying, it also made luxury travel the exception rather than the norm. Configured with luxury seating and berths, the Boeing Stratocruiser carried about fifty-five passengers; in day-plane configuration with high-density seating, this same airplane carried a hundred or more passengers.
At night, Boeing 377 Stratocruiser passengers retired to Pullman-type berths and were soon lulled to sleep by the reassuring drone of powerful engines.
Boeing
Starting with the Convair 240 and Martin 202, smaller piston airliners had also come to market for use on short routes. These postwar twin-engine airliners, and the four-engine Vickers Viscount and Lockheed Electra turboprops that followed, never sold in great number because so many military derivatives of the DC-3 (now converted back to civil use) soldiered on in airline feeder services. While those newer types offered higher performance and greater comfort, the low acquisition and operating costs of war surplus C-47s kept them popular with operators for decades.
Gold-toned dressing rooms were a hit with Stratocruiser passengers.
Boeing
The commercial jet age began with airplanes such as the Comet,707, or DC-8. All of them were noisy to people on the ground but not to passengers inside. Compared to piston airliners, in fact, those first-generation jet transports were remarkably quiet inside and largely free of the fatiguing vibrations that had previously characterized air travel.
The manufacturers took this transition as an opportunity to redefine the passenger experience. Jet-age seats were mounted on tracks so airlines could