Imagine a world where aeroplane food consisted of 17 aperitifs, two hors d’oeuvres (including caviar and turtle soup), a choice of six entrées, cheese, a dessert, fresh fruit, coffee, a selection of champagne, burgundy, bordeaux, and liquor if you needed something a little stronger. All wolfed down in a mushroom cloud of second-hand cigarette smoke. Welcome to the 1970s.
This week’s archive Observer Magazine from 11 January 1970 investigates commercial air travel. The magazine sent Eric Clark into the clouds to report back on whether flying was really as groovy as the ads made out.
After traversing the skies in an assortment of 747s and investigating such minutiae as seat pitch, legroom and aisle width, Clark concluded that: ‘Flying is uncomfortable, for most people frightening, and often boring.’ Plus ça change.
Lufthansa was the champion carrier, boasting the most space between seats and ‘a refreshing approach’ to advertising, picturing ‘crowds fighting to get on board, screwed-up passengers eating in confined spaces, and the early-morning queue for the lavatory’.
Airport duty-free shops did not escape Clark’s scrutiny, particularly the serious business of Scotch and cigarette prices: Shannon and Schiphol emerged victorious.
Being an air hostess, according to Clark, was ‘not a career’, indeed most airlines retired their hostesses before the age of 35. And that’s if they met the hiring criteria in the first place. ‘Overweight girls are out. Airlines don’t usually take girls who wear dentures, or spectacles, and none would take a girls with a pronounced accent.’
If you had perfect teeth, 20/20 vision and an RP accent, you were then forced to squeeze your arse into a girdle for 10 hours at a time ‘so as to stop passengers seeing your bottom wiggle.’ Perhaps Clark had a point.
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