From a friend who remembers when...
Those really were the good ol' days.
Pilots all knew who Jimmy
Doolittle was. They chased women, drank coffee and whiskey, and smoked cigars. They carried their own suitcases like the real men that they were.
Pilots didn't bend over into the
crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so
that some Government slug could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or
too much toothpaste.
Pilots did not go through the terminal impersonating
a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars, and feed bags full of
tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a
pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on
the cell phone!
Back then, being an Airline Captain was as good as being the King in
a Mel Brooks movie.
All the
Stewardesses (aka - Flight Attendants) were young, attractive, single women who
were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolution. They didn't have to turn
sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would
blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a
sexual harassment claim. Junior Stewardesses shared a room and talked about
men.... with no thoughts of substitution.
Passengers wore nice clothes
and were polite - they could speak and understand English. They didn't speak
gibberish or listen to loud annoying rap on their Ipods. They actually bathed so they didn't smell
like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops.
Children didn't
travel alone, commuting between trailer parks.
There were no foul-mouthed "gangsta's"
asking for a "mu-fuggin" seat belt extension or a Scotch and grapefruit juice
cocktail with a twist.
If the Captain wanted to throw some offensive,
ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a law suit or
getting fired.
Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and
left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet
fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there, after
all it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast (run like a lizard on a
hardwood floor).
"Economy cruise" was something in the performance book, but no
one knew why or where it was. When the "clacker" went off no one got all tight and
scared because Boeing built 'em
out of iron back then, so nothing was going to fall off, and that sound had a satisfying affect on real pilots then.
There was very little plastic and
no composites on the airplanes (or the Stewardesses' pectoral regions). Airplanes
and women had eye pleasing symmetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins,
winglets, and flow diverters.
Airlines were run by men like C. E. Woolman, C.
R. Smith and Juan Trippe who
had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew many of their employees
by name, and were lifetime airline employees themselves...not "financial" types
and bean counters who flit from one occupation to another for a few bucks, a
better "golden" parachute, or a fancier title - while fervently believing that they are a
class of beings unto themselves.
And so it was, back then....