What Flying Used to be Like Before It Was Ruined

What Flying Used to be Like Before It Was Ruined There was a time in this country when you put on your good clothes to go to the airport. When your whole family walked straight to the gate, no lines, no bins, no belts, because that was just how it worked. When the terminal was a building that meant something, designed by architects who believed flight was a human achievement worth honoring in concrete and glass. When the meal came on a tray with a foil cover and you ate it with a metal fork at thirty-five thousand feet and felt, without quite being able to say why, that someone was taking care of you. This is the story of what flying used to be in America. Pan American World Airways, which once flew to 84 countries from a single hub. TWA's Saarinen terminal at JFK, a building that looked like it was trying to leave the ground. Braniff International, which hired Alexander Girard and Emilio Pucci and painted its planes solid turquoise and lemon yellow and called it the End of the Plain Plane. The flight attendants who had been to Karachi and Nairobi and Hong Kong and came home to Memphis. The 747, which only exists because one man named Juan Trippe called up Boeing and said he wanted a plane twice the size of anything flying. And it's the story of what happened after 1978, when the Airline Deregulation Act turned the sky into a bus terminal. How the legroom disappeared an inch at a time. How the meals became pretzels, the Saarinen buildings became drop ceilings, the named routes became numbered flights, and the whole idea that getting on an airplane was an adventure quietly died in a conference room somewhere without anyone meaning for it to happen. Of the ten major carriers flying American skies in 1978, most are gone. Pan Am: 1991. Eastern: 1991. Braniff: 1982. TWA: 2001. The planes that were works of art are parked in the desert, fading in the sun. But somewhere in a garage there is a set of silver-plate cutlery someone's grandmother took from a Pan Am flight. Somewhere there is a Braniff boarding pass, orange, from a Tuesday in November 1974. And somewhere, in a box you haven't opened in years, there might be a small pair of plastic wings a captain pinned to your jacket when you were seven years old and he let you sit in the cockpit and see everything. This one is for the people who remember what it felt like to be handed those wings. #nostalgia #1960snostalgia #1950snostalgia