 |
| DC 6 |
As a child, I flew fairly frequently, not because my family was affluent, but quite the opposite, because U.S. airlines found that by giving their workers free travel they could pay well below the usual pay scale for various occupations. My dad was a licensed machinist, a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) union, who worked for United Air Lines (UAL) at their San Francisco main maintenance based from the time I was 6 months old until I was 25 years old (and he was 65).
For the first fifteen years of my life, my father and all the other IAMAW workers for the airlines were paid substantially less per hour than machinists in other industries. The airlines argued that they provided workers and their families with free air travel, an untaxed benefit in those days, and therefore did not need to pay their employees more. This was successfully challenged by the Great Airline Strike of 1966, but that is a story for another blog post. This post is about what it was like to be a frequent flyer in the 1950's and early 1960's, as a pass-riding employee family and child.
The earliest trip I can remember would have been when I was three and a half, when my brother Charlie was just over a year old. That meant that we needed three seats on the plane, two for mom and dad, one for me, and Charlie would have to sit on mom's lap. As an employee family riding on a free pass, we were always on "stand-by" meaning that we would call in, tell the reservations agent our intentions as the flight we wished to take, but have no actual guarantee of getting on that flight. We had to show up in person at the gate and wait until everyone else was boarded, and if there were enough seats left over we got on. If not, we stayed at the airport and waited for the next flight that might take us in the direction we wished to go.
 |
| Charlie and me in 1954 |
The uncertainty meant that my parents had to plan for food, drink and diapers for Charlie. They had to be ready to take naps in the airport. Because we were low income we could not afford to buy things at the airport (or on the plane where meals were not free), so we brought our own food - sandwiches or sometimes cold fried chicken and lots of fruit. Sometimes we got on the first flight, sometimes we waited for hours, but we always eventual got a flight.
The first plane I remember riding in was a DC 6 which had four propeller engines, two on each wing (see photo at top of post). Made by the Douglas Aircraft Company from 1946 to 1958, it was the primary work horse of U.S. airlines during those years. The body of the DC 6 is not much narrower than modern jets (excluding "wide-bodies") and there were only two seats on each side of the plane, so a family like ours that needed three seats was always in at least two rows and as the last comers, often not rows near each other. The seats on those small DC 6's were wider and more comfortable than what you find on today's jets. The isles were quite a bit narrower.
The DC 6 did not have a highly pressurized cabin. It did flew at a much lower altitude than present day jets do. That meant many things for a child: amazing views of the world below the plane because we were much closer to it; skimming just above the clouds most of the time, but sometimes actually flying through clouds which always felt mysterious and fabulous; and a really significant change in pressure on take-offs and landings that was really felt in your ears. One of the tasks of stewardesses (yes, stewardesses, they were always young, unmarried women) was to pass out chewing gum to every passenger both before take-off and again just before landing. Chewing the gum would help people adjust to the changes in air pressure and relieve the pain in their ears. It was also a task that stewardesses were glad to hand over to a bright, cute blonde child who felt very grown-up going from row to row offering people gum. There were other small tasks that the stewardesses might give me to do, but the one that sticks in my mind the most is the handing out of gum.
Not only did the DC 6 fly lower than today's jets, but it was slower, had less fuel capacity, and had much less range. In addition to the technical issues that limited range, all civilian air traffic was controlled by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) a government regulatory agency. The CAB controlled which airlines got which routes, how much they could charge for each route, and how many hours that pilots and cabin crews could work. In the 1950's the CAB limited airline crews to 8 hours of work per 24 hour period. NO overtime allowed. An airline that allowed a crew to work longer than eight hours, even if it was just a few minutes could be heavily fined by the CAB. So if one was traveling from one coast to another in the United States, one could not do so in one plane with one crew because it took too long.
Now my family's trips by plane were always from San Francisco (where we lived) to visit my parents' families in Virginia, where we were from. In the 1950's those trips were never non-stop. The best flights had only one stop in a major hub like Chicago, but often the only flights we could get on were shorter hops, like to Denver or Salt Lake City, and then required at least two more hops to make it all the way to Virginia (to National Airport, now Reagan in DC, or Friendship, now BWI Thurgood Marshall, in Baltimore).
Multiple stops and plane changes were probably irritating for paying customers, but they could be seriously problematic for stand-by flyers like ourselves. It was not uncommon to lose our seats to paying passengers at an intermediary stop. Sometimes that meant a few hours of sitting in a strange airport waiting for another flight, on rare occasions it meant an unbudgeted and difficult to afford overnight at a hotel. When I was six and our family had expanded to five members, Charlie was four and baby Frank was less than one, we had a trip where we were first "bumped" (removed in favor of paying passengers) in Salt Lake City. This was not problematic as one of mom's brothers lived nearby in Ogden. So we had an unscheduled but delightful visit for several days with my Utah cousins. Then come Monday we got a flight from Salt Lake to Chicago and got bumped again. The next flight that was at all possible was at least 12 hours away the next day, so all five of us including a wailing baby ended up in a very cheap Chicago motel room with no air conditioning in August. Not a pleasant memory. Luckily we found a flight the next morning and were in the arms of family again in Virginia.
In my second installment I will talk about how the introduction of jets changed our experiences as pass riding passengers.
