The Airplane - Jay Spenser [122]
When the 707 and DC-8 entered service, many airlines gave them all-first-class interiors. Premium-fare passengers flew aboard these new jets, while those traveling on economy tickets went by propeller airliner (many years would pass before the propeller fleet was entirely phased out of international service). This further consolidated in the public mind the superiority of the jet travel experience.
In 1970, Boeing took the world’s breath away with the Boeing 747 jumbo jet. With a roomy cabin nearly 20 feet (6.1 meters) across, it introduced a new paradigm for air travel: the widebody jetliner with two aisles, not one.
Like the 707 and Stratocruiser before it, the 747 was the result of a creative cabin design collaboration between Teague and Boeing. Among their many innovations, this design team moved the jet’s galleys and lavatories away from the sidewalls and into the center to create islands every so often down the cavernous fuselage. This distributed the passengers’ seating among areas with more room-like proportions, avoiding the unpleasant tube effect that made late versions of the much-stretched DC-8 so unpopular with passengers.
Another clever design innovation was to set the 747’s windows, which were no larger than those of the 707, in wash-lit reveals that registered subliminally as far larger windows, suggesting an open and light-filled environment. Experience with successive generations of airplanes has further increased the global aerospace industry’s collective understanding of human psychology and the factors that influence one’s perceptions of personal comfort.
Almost as wide as the 747 is the 777 twinjet, which debuted in service in 1995. The 777 introduced a curvilinear interior design that was another product of the longtime Boeing-Teague industrial collaboration. Open and spacious, it uses sweeping curves and clever indirect lighting to evoke the graceful flight of birds.
Introduced early in the 1970s, the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic transport (SST) provided a very different, highly memorable flight experience. Although the Concorde’s leather seats were richly upholstered, they were surprisingly tight, and the cabin itself was cramped, with just two seats on each side of a constricted aisle. The windows were ludicrously tiny compared to those of any other airliner, and the exit door was so small that taller passengers tended to hit their heads when deplaning.
Nevertheless, the Concorde shaped positive impressions because everything from one end of this rakish machine to the other bespoke all-out performance. If one needed reminders in flight, a screen at the front of the one-hundred-seat cabin displayed the SST’s current airspeed and altitude as well as the current outside air temperature.
Concordes cruised at altitudes approaching 60,000 feet (18,288 meters), half again higher than subsonic jetliners. The curvature of the earth is visible at that extreme altitude, where the outside temperature generally hovers around-75°F (-60°C). Even so, a supersonic cruise speed topping Mach 2 would heat the SST’s skin through friction to the point where the Concorde’s windows felt noticeably warm.
Most startling of all was arriving at the other side of the North Atlantic just three and a half hours after departing. Seat size ultimately didn’t matter because there wasn’t time to become uncomfortable on the Concorde. Today it’s all a fading memory, however, because supersonic flight is too energy-intensive. A Concorde with one hundred passengers consumed about as much fuel crossing the Atlantic as a 747 with four hundred passengers.
Increased competition, rising costs, and reduced profit margins have taken an inexorable toll on the passenger experience in recent decades. In a sense, airlines are a victim of their own past success because people often have unrealistically