Perhaps a relevant bit of trivia. William Shatner was on the tv series. John Lithgow remade the same scene for the twilight zone movie. i was never much of a fan of 3rd rock from the sun, but they did have this adorable little (20 second) callback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTNOihQnqVQ
Cultural connoisseurs will also no doubt be aware that Johnny Bravo covered that episode the Twilight Zone too, except instead of Gremlins, it was Clowns....
It also cost 10x the price and was worse in just about every safety and operational metric. For all of the 'charm' that's disappeared out of flying, its democritisation has resulted in it becoming like car travel was in the 50s.
By and large, it was middle-middle and upper middle and above who travelled by plane then. They tended to be the kinds of people who typically had some decorum (you mention the suits, so it's clear they are people of some higher status), so you didn't have your run of the mill middle-class and lower-middle class brats on the plane. And people hadn't thought of exploiting the system much --till the 70s when it became democratized and then you had highjackings every week practically and so now we get what we get.
That's not a bad thing, but as things gain a wider audience and becomes less of a luxury item things change --kind of like what one sees in online discussion boards and their evaporative cooling effect.
> you mention the suits, so it's clear they are people of some higher status
Not really; having and wearing a suit is something that has increased in association with formality and higher class; it used to be de rigueur for a much wider slice of society, outside of contexts (e.g., actually doing physical work at the time) where it was inappropriate.
Granted, yes, it was more like Japan is today in that sense but never the less, I maintain my point that flying wasn't something Joe or Susie did, it was the something jetsetters did --people who could afford the luxury of flying. They were not your farmboys and bricklayers who went flying taking their kids on a cheap leisure vacation to Disney, etc...
Still, you see these people had crisp pressed suits, not ratty and raggy well worn suits.
Indeed; I believe casual dress in general-purpose, public adult leisure contexts was initially associated strongly with the upper/upper-middle classes and was seen as a signal of higher status, even in cases where the dress item in question was an appropriation from the working class (e.g., jeans).
I still wear a jacket while flying. To me, clothing is an outward sign of respect to those around you and is very effective when interacting with airport staff. A smile and a suit coat can get you amazingly far when your flight is delayed, cancelled, etc. You are treated differently at an airport when dressed appropriately.
which, in 21st century, is plain wrong. if I go hiking for 3 weeks in Nepal and have only outdoorsy clothing with me, I should be treated exactly same as everybody else. equality and whatnot.
I know it's how we all react on daily basis, everything is evaluated with some emotional context, but that doesn't make it a good behavior and something to be okay with.
A lot of air travel was for work because it was so expensive, thus the suit wearing. You can hunt around for some pictures of flying in the 60s and 70s and fine no shortage of people in vacation gear or 'street' clothes but back then even street clothes were more formal (you'd toss on a sports jacket or fedora without thinking twice about it for even yardwork). A lot of what we see today in photos are carefully crafted PR and marketing pieces. People back then didn't have smartphones to photograph an average cabin, so we see these wonderfully staged photos of a gorgeous stewardess carving up a turkey for a well-dressed and posed family, which isn't exactly something common in flight. Do you really want someone on an aircraft that can jostle at any time holding a carving knife at your neck's height?
Also, that's not a plane, its a Hollywood set. You can't open the door mid-flight as the pressurized cabin won't allow you, at least past a certain year when all airplanes standardized on the inward opening door. Everyone is thin and glamorous looking because they're actors. Everyone is well dressed because the costume department made it so (no ill fitting suits or out of fashion dresses and skirts). No crying babies because it would ruin the drama. No elderly people having a coughing fit. No dirty looks if you happen to have the wrong skin color.
I also don't see how people smoking is supposed to be this wonderful freedom loving thing. As someone old enough to have been around where people smoked next to you all the time in just about any social setting, it was disgusting and unbelievably rude and entitled, on top of being a major health issue for those exposed to second-hand smoke, especially children. I'm not sure what the GP was implying but you don't want to go back to those days. A recent week in Japan reminded me of my childhood and that aspect of my trip was fairly unpleasant.
I feel like this is akin to working for a small company versus a larger company. Rules always cater to the lowest common denominator, because the people that make the rules are lazy and prefer blanket policies over stratified ones.
In a small team, the internet is not all clamped down at work. You are more likely to be treated like a mature adult. At a large company, they treat everyone like children because that one imbecile did that stupid thing that one time.
Now, the risk in acknowledging this phenomena is that you come off sounding elitist, "I want to join an exclusive club so I don't have the cretins dragging me down."
Usually the back third or so and on long flights it was horrible. Also, the cabin pressure in those days was thinner than it usually is now and the air dryer.
The air was somewhat drier but also of higher 'quality' because less of it was recirculated; most was fresh intake from the atmosphere, heated, passed through the cabin and dumped.
The introduction of widebody twins in the early 1980s coincided with increased air recirculation, in order to reduce bleed-air load on the engines, and until the 787 and A380 it was often over 60% recirculated.
Ironically the elimination of smoking led to a big increase in recirculated air.
It's probably not reducing the overall exposure to carcinogens, but there's something to be said for not sitting right next to someone while they smoke.
I flew internationally extensively in '00/'01 and that must have been just after it was banned. I remember an Olympic flight from London to Athens where the now-standard "you can't smoke" announcements were made, and the signs were all turned on, and the second the wheels left the tarmac fully half of the plane lit up.
In the same period I flew Air France, to Senegal if memory serves. Again, no smoking and all that, but the stewardesses all bundled up in their galley, curtains closed, and were puffing away.
I flew from JFK to Heathrow in 1986 (don't recall the airline but assume it was either a major US carrier or British Airways) - I vividly remember the cabin being full of cigarette smoke. I suppose there must have been a nominal "section" but can't remember.
According to Wikipedia:
"After years of debate over health concerns, Congressional action in 1987 led to a ban on inflight smoking.
The U.S. ban on inflight smoking began with domestic flights of two hours or less in April 1988, extended to domestic flights of six hours or less in February 1990, and to all domestic and international flights in 2000."
I was just thinking that, holy cow. It's bad enough when a smoker sits down next to you on the bus. Imagine the guy next to you lighting up on a four hour flight. Holy shit.
Worse still, at the time of this episode (1963), there wasn't even a notion of a "Smoking Section". Smokers lit up anywhere on planes, anywhere in restaurants, anywhere in the office, on line at the bank, in any sort of waiting room, really anywhere in general. The very concept of a "Smoking Section" wasn't a thing until the 70's, and it was years before they were ubiquitous in the US.
Even as a former smoker, I never really thought too much about smoking sections until my wife was pregnant. Suddenly someone smoking in the wrong area was a threat to my unborn child and really rubbed me the wrong way. I'm all for personal freedom, but exercising this one around others is stomping on their freedom to breathe freely. I'm glad as a society we've moved on from this for the most part.
Even as late as 1995, I remember flying from South Africa to the UK (in the non-smoking section) while the guy behind me (in the smoking section) was smoking extremely smelly eastern European cigarettes. Quite an adventure when you're prone to airsickness.
When I was a boy in the 80s it was still common. My parents didn't smoke, so I loved going on planes, or into restaurants & hospitals (!) to smell smoke. I'm sad that we've lost that culture.
The same thing happened to me on the Shinkansen. My eyes were stinging by the end of it. Thankfully they have replaced smoking cars with smoking rooms since then. The JP govt appears to be cracking down on smoking + "encouraging" free Wi-Fi everywhere in time for 2020.
