Flying - Part 2

 

In 1960 United Air Lines purchased its first passenger jets, the DC 8 made by Douglas Aircraft. The company through a huge party for all of the workers at the San Francisco Maintenance Base and their families. The party was held inside one of the huge new hangers designed for the jet aircraft. There was food and live music by The New Christy Minstrels. The acoustics inside the hangar were amazing, especially when the band got the entire audience to participate in a round of Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore.  The highlight of the party was the opportunity to walk through the new DC 8 and see all the new features of the aircraft. 

The plane was so large, much longer than a DC 6 or DC 7 propeller plane, and somewhat wider as well. The initial DC 8's had only two rows on each side with only two seats together, just like the propeller planes, but the isles were wider, and the cabins felt much more open. Even someone over six feet tall could fully stand up in most of the plane. 

There was one small catch: pass passengers (i.e., employees and their families riding for free) were barred from riding on the jets when they were initially put into service. The ban did not last all that long.

 As I wrote in the first installment about flying as the child of an employee, all commercial air travel was tightly controlled by the  Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a federal government regulatory agency that determined which airlines got which routes and how much could be charged for the various levels of service. Airlines were not able to compete with each other on the price, as the price of flights was determined for all airlines by the CAB. The CAB kept prices high so that they would adequately cover all the costs of regular maintenance, up-keep, and all the labor of pilots, stewardesses, and ground crew. The lowest cost coach fare for a round trip ticket from west coast (San Francisco) to east coast (Washington, DC) in the 1960's was about $550. Adjusted for inflation that is the same as about $5,600 today (2025) which is substantially more than a person would pay for a first-class round trip ticket today. In other words, air travel was out of the reach of most Americans in the 1960's. Affluent people, business men, and air line employees were the only frequent fliers. 

What this meant in practical terms was that the new big jet aircraft that United and other airlines now flew non-stop across the country were frequently only partially full, and at some times nearly empty.  As a result the ban on pass riding employees on the jets ended pretty quickly. The airlines realized that filling those seats with employees on vacation looked better for business than having a sea of empty seats. Riding on a pass as an employee came with some rules and responsibilities, one of which was how one dressed. Employees could be barred from flights if they or their family members were not sufficiently dressed up, especially since it soon became common practice for employees to be placed in the first class section, as those seats were less often filled than coach class. So I was always wearing dresses and dress shoes while flying. When I was in college I sometimes envied my friends who were paying for their tickets because they could get on a plane in blue jeans and a sweat shirt, but I always had to be dressed up. 

Most of my memories of flying on jets are memories of flying first class and all that entailed in the 1960's and 1970's. This included not only family vacations from California back to Virginia to see relatives, but also my four years of solo travel while going to college in Ohio. Cross country first class travel was leisurely and luxurious. Meals in the first class cabin were served on real china plates with real silverware, actual crystal glasses, and sparkling white, cloth napkins. The food was served hot from china serving dishes on a cart directly to your plate. Often one of the entres was roast beef, where a large roast (enough to feed dozens of people) sat on a wooden carving board on the cart, and the stewardess would cut the amount you wanted from either the end the was more well done, or the end that was more on the rare side. When you were old enough (as I was in college) the stewardess would pour you wine in a crystal goblet from the several bottles available on her cart. The food was always delicious. 

The first year that my family and I traveled by jet was also in the first year that Dulles International Airport was open (it opened in November 1962 and we traveled there in the summer of 1963). The Dulles International Airport was the first airport specifically designed for jet planes, and only the second airport directly owned and operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (the FAA). It was initially authorized by President Eisenhower and took 12 years from authorization to opening. Eero Saarinen was the architect who designed its sweeping roof and modern lines. It was by far my favorite airport, so open and airy and modern. And it had the first "digital" clocks I'd ever seen. where the numbers were on cards that clicked over with each minute. 

The most unusual thing about Dulles was its "mobile lounges". Jet planes did not taxi up to the terminal building at Dulles, but sat out away from the building on the tarmac. Passengers would present their tickets at the gate inside the terminal and then be ushered into a large room with comfortable seating all around it. The room had many windows so that passengers could watch what was happening on the tarmac.  

One of my most memorable travel experiences happened at Dulles, to be honest I cannot remember if it was on our first trip in 1963, or a later trip in 1965, although I expect the latter. We were at the end of our vacation, tired and ready to go home. The plane was unusually full, so there was some question about whether or not we would be able to get on. Also unusual was that the president of United Air Lines, William Patterson was also on the flight. I can remember him standing and talking with my father in the mobile lounge. Patterson helped to make sure that we got on the flight, even though we had to be separated and scattered throughout the plane. There were five of us and they were able to seat my mother and my youngest brother together (he would have been 8 at the time), my other brother (12) and me (14) were sitting alone among strangers, as was my father. The plane was full, every seat filled even in first class. And something went wrong. 

I'm sure they told us what it was, but I don't remember it specifically enough, just that there was a crucial part that wasn't working. At first they thought that they could fix it. So they held all of us on the plane while the maintenance crews worked. That took a while. Then the word came that it could not be fixed, that it had to be replaced and the part had to be flown in from somewhere else. That would take some time, but it would take less time than it would to free up another jet and fly it in. It was summer time, and very hot and humid and on the ground, the planes own air conditioning system wouldn't work. 

Mr. Patterson took control of the situation. He told everyone what was going on, told people that he was ordering ground HVAC trucks to come and hook up to the plane, ordering more food and drink, making all drinks free. If anyone wanted to leave they would happily accommodate them, but to my knowledge no one left the plane. If they did they did so quietly without any fuss. The air conditioning got hooked up, the plane cooled off, the food and booze started to flow, and a really big party got going. No one got belligerent or angry, although some adults got quite tipsy and silly. There was lots of laughter and joking and storytelling.  We were on the ground, on the tarmac for four hours total before being cleared for take-off. In our family we always talked about the time the passengers got high before the plane took off. Can you imagine any of that happening today?

Unlike during the era of the propeller planes, the DC 6s and DC 7s, during the era of jet travel my family never experienced being "bumped" and only that one time at Dulles ever had difficulty getting on a flight. During my four years of college when I traveled back and forth between San Francisco and the Cleveland Hopkins Airport, I also never really had difficulty getting on a flight, and usually ended up in first class. However, my sophomore year, I decided that instead of going home for fall break I would go visit relatives in Virginia. That experience was very different. Planes from Cleveland to DC (or to other cities on the eastern seaboard like NYC or Boston) were very frequently full, and not easy to get on for a pass-passenger, even though such flights were far more frequent than the cross-continental ones. 

I set out for fall break in the early morning, and did not get on the flight for which I'd registered. I had to find a payphone, call and re-register to stand-by for another flight. This one in about 3 hours. Lot's of college students who were not children of airline employees also used standby as a way to get cheaper paid tickets, so many of my fellow students were stuck in the airport with me waiting for a flight. There was a young man, who was a couple of years older than me, a senior when I was a sophomore, that was also stuck waiting for an open flight to Chicago. We had worked together in the college cafeterias for more than a year, but had never had time for a long conversation. I think we probably talked on and off for a total of five hours that day, through several missed flights. 

He finally got one to Chicago, but I reached the end of the day without getting a flight to Washington, DC and I was panicking. I didn't have any way to get back to the college, not much money, and my next possible flight was the next morning. It looked like I might have to stay in the airport all night. I found a pay phone to re-register to standby for the first flight in the morning. The woman working in reservations asked me for a phone number for contact, and I started to cry. I told her, my situation, stuck at the airport with no place to go, and an amazing thing happened. She said that she worked there at the airport, and that I could meet her when she got off work, ride the metro-train into Cleveland and stay overnight at her apartment, sleep on the couch and then ride the train back in the morning with her for my flight.  

I remember her kindness, but I don't remember her name or even what she looked like, although I do remember her roommate - a very vivacious blonde. I remember the metro-train, how clean it was, how smooth and quiet it was. I remember the apartment, the couch I slept on and the poster on the wall. The poster was picture of a single large tree in the middle of a field with low hills behind it and the words "Let it Be" on it (the title of a Beatles song). I also remember how miserable it was not to have clean underwear, and how I never, once since that day ever went anywhere without a clean pair of underwear in my purse.  The next day, I got on the first plane and was on my way to visit with relatives - a story for another day. 

One last memorable plane ride: my very last one as a pass-passenger. I graduated from Oberlin College at the end of May 1973. I would not qualify for any more passes as an adult child, not in college after this my last trip, home after college. Unlike most of my friends, I did not go home immediately after graduation. The dorms were closed, but I was dating a man 15 years older than me who lived in town, and had moved in with him for a week. I had a couple of other friends who also lived in town, including a family that I had started as a babysitter for and become one of the family. I had ties to the town that went beyond the college and I wasn't quite ready to give them up yet. One of my friends, not the man I was dating, was a lawyer who who worked for the city of Oberlin as their local prosecutor, and he had plans to travel to San Francisco for a legal convention a week after my graduation. So part of the reason I delayed was so that I could have companionship, rather than fly alone which I had done for four years. 

On the day of our flight to San Francisco, the plane was not full, so I had no difficulty getting on it, but as was customary, the flight attendants wanted to move me to first class. My friend, Chuck, however, had a coach ticket and so I told I wanted to stay there, and someone else could get the bump to first class. This was only the second time I'd ever gotten to travel with a friend, and was really enjoying our conversation. I was a veteran traveler and Chuck had flown a number of times, but both of us were very much startled by the rather large bump and noise, almost like a small explosion, that occurred during our take-off. After we had gained some altitude, and leveled out a bit, the pilot came on the intercom and told us what had happened. At least one, and perhaps more of the tires on one of the landing gear had blown just as the plane lifted off. This presented no problems at all for us in our trip across the country, but could mean danger in landing in San Francisco. The decision was to continue on, alert San Francisco and take appropriate cautions on landing. 

The trip itself was extremely pleasant and unremarkable, I really enjoyed Chuck's company, we spent most of the time talking about shared interests and shared friends. But as we approached San Francisco, the pilot came back on to tell us what to expect. While everything might be okay, San Francisco was scrambling all its firefighting equipment and lining it up along the runway, just in case. The pilot warned us we would see not only fire trucks but also large numbers of ambulances, and that we would go through all the procedures of an emergency landing. In all my 22 years of flying I had never been through an emergency landing, although I knew after all those years exactly what to do. We had to take our glasses off, stow everything away, put our heads down and brace against the seat in front of us. Chuck and I expressed our appreciation to each other for having a friend to go through this with. 

The landing was the roughest I've ever experienced. Missing two tires on one side, lead to a very bumpy, rocky ride, but the plane stayed level, the fire trucks and ambulances were not needed, and we walked off the plane safe and sound. 

I have flown dozens of times after that last pass-passenger flight, but always as a paying customer. Moreover, plane travel has changed drastically since the 1970's. The CAB was eliminated in 1977. Airlines have been free to set their own rates, and also free to go bankrupt. My last trip by plane (probably my last ever plane travel) from Kentucky to San Francisco in 2013 was even first class, but it is nothing like it once was. 

Flying - Part 1

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.