What were flights like in the 60s?

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.



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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.

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Cruising speeds for commercial airliners now range between about 480 and 510 knots, compared to 525 knots for the Boeing 707 during the 1960's, according to a 2014 article from the MIT School Of Engineering.

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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.

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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 .

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According to Drela, today's airplane builders actually favor a smaller, lighter, and therefore slower aircraft that peaks its fuel efficiency at slower speeds. (Cars also become more efficient at slower speeds on highways.)

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In 1990, federal law required large jet airplanes to comply with stage 3 noise standards by 1999, leading to a phase-out of the noisiest airplanes (stage 1 and 2 airplanes). Later, federal law required smaller airplanes to comply with stage 3 standards by 2016.

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Aviation's 'golden age': The 1950s and 1960s have now nostalgically become known as air travel's golden age.

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+ * 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.

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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.

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Aircraft age is not a safety factor. However, if the aircraft is older and hasn't been refurbished properly, it may cause flyers some inconvenience such as overheating, faulty air conditioning, or faulty plumbing in the lavatory. More important than an aircraft's age is its history.

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Just like a car, the older an airplane gets the more maintenance it requires. Just like a car, however, given the proper care and maintenance an older plane can be just as safe and operable as a new version, albeit without some of the fuel efficient designs of new models.

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Bleriot Monoplane The 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.

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Undefeated record: The world record for the world's longest continuous flight was set in 1959 by Robert Timm (pictured) and his co-pilot John Cook. Months in the air: The men flew in this four-seater aircraft for 64 days, 22 hours and 19 minutes.

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In 1958, that Cessna 172 flew nonstop for 64 days, 22 hours and 19 minutes and covered 150,000 miles (240,000 kilometers). That's about six times around the Earth or 15 Sydney-New York flights without touching the ground, and still stands as a world record, according to the Guinness World Records.

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Pressure for an inflight smoking ban also came from flight attendants' unions, such as the Association of Flight Attendants. United Airlines created a nonsmoking section in 1971, the first airline to do so. Aurigny Air Services became the first airline to ban smoking entirely on its flights, in July 1977.

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