Flying was becoming more commonplace in the 1960s, and it was less glamorous than in the previous decade. Flying became more and more common in the 1960s.
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Sweeping cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s reshaped the airline industry. More people began to fly, and air travel became less exclusive. Between 1955 and 1972, passenger numbers more than quadrupled. By 1972 almost half of all Americans had flown, although most passengers were still business travelers.
Flying became more and more common in the 1960s. Passengers didn't dress up as much as before, though they typically dressed up more than passengers do today. Passengers flying in the 1960s could also fly without any form of ID, HuffPost reported.
This was the Golden Age of Flight. Specifically, the interwar years between 1918 and 1939 saw a breakthrough in aviation that revolutionized the way people fly and changed twentieth-century history .
The ICAO attributes the improvements in safety to the safety commitments shared across the industry. In fact, the trend across many years of aviation is that, today, it is safer than ever to fly.
Fares were also much higher. According to Simons, a transatlantic flight ticket in the early 1960s would cost around $600, which is about $5,800 in today's money. Nevertheless, nostalgia for the period abounds, and Pan Am in particular is still remembered fondly as the pinnacle of the air travel experience.
+ * 57,700,000 passengers carried in 1960, up 3,000,000 over 1959-as compared with a gain of some 7,000,000 the previous year. 38.8 billion revenue passenger-miles in 1960, up 2.5 billion over 1959-as compared with a gain of 5 billion the previous year.
Some planes were spacious and pressurized: the Boeing Stratocruiser, for example, could seat 50 first class passengers or 81 coach passengers compared to the DC-3's 21 passengers. People also forget that well into the 1960s, air travel was far more dangerous than it is today.
Security screenings didn't become mandatory until the early 1970s when bigger flights meant more passengers. Security screenings didn't become mandatory until 1973, and even those were pretty relaxed compared to the airport security we go through today, The Boston Globe reported.
Bleriot MonoplaneThe oldest plane still flying in the world is the Bleriot XI. And it's not even close! Where generations of aircraft have been built and retired in its wake, the Bleriot XI, one of the first planes ever, built in 1909, still flies in Hudson Valley, New York.
But people didn't take flying for granted in the 1950s, when air travel was still new and exciting. In that era, flight attendants served in-flight meals on fine china plates with proper cutlery, passengers could stretch their legs in lounges on the plane, and even sleep in seats that converted into beds.
Subsequently, following concerted lobbying efforts by health advocates, Congress passed legislation banning smoking on US domestic flights of less than two hours, which became effective in 1988. The law was made permanent and extended to flights of less than six hours in 1990.