I was going to comment on the same thing. There were no decent small wheels until Rollerblades came along with their molded polypropylene wheels and ball bearings. Skateboard wheels were a similar technology, but not as easy to mount on things.
There's an album cover from the late 50s of bassist Paul Chambers rolling has bass down the sidewalk with a wheel on the bottom of his bass.
Did the pilots in the 50s lug their own bag of clothes & shaving gear, on those flights with half a dozen stops to Australia? I always imagined this was simply taken care of by the airline, hotel to hotel, even if the pilot looked after his own professional gear. So I don't think their cash wages relative to porters are all that relevant. But would be interesting to know when this switched over.
Senior airline pilots in the 1980s made a lot of money.
But that's not so relevant. I can't come up with a realistic case where it's more effective for any party to have the air crew pay for porter services out-of-pocket, rather than paid by the company.
A few points: air crew have pretty good mobility, and limited space for luggage, so there isn't much need for a porter service for more than one bad.
The crew have to handle off-hours, like after most airport services are closed, or redirected to another airport.
To be effective, the porters need access to everywhere aircrew can go - airline offices, passport control areas, and more. Doable, but it requires agreements from the airport and airlines.
Flight crews aren't that big, so it makes more sense (IMO) for the airlines to arrange those services, than to have the air crew - no matter how well paid - handle it themselves from their salary.
>Senior airline pilots in the 1980s made a lot of money.
Junior stewardesses. At any rate senior airline pilots made a good middle class income, certainly not wealthy with butlers. Even paying someone minimum wage to carry the bag to the airport would be a significant chunk of change.
The thesis is that wheeled bags were created due to "air travel by people too poor to have someone else cary the bag".
I read this as meaning specifically passengers, but I'll accept that it also applies to flight crew.
My counter-thesis is that even if they could afford porter services, wheeled luggage is still useful, and there's no reason that a, say, $5 million/year salary would have precluded the creation of wheeled luggage for flight crew.
It really must be porter services, as personal butlers isn't a realistic possibility. Consider that crew changes mean the butler may end up on a different flight than the crew member, at the last minute. The butler could follow in a private jet, but it needs the same range, and the ability to handle the same weather.
Could Besos, working as a steward with a last-minute flight change into La Guardia when all slots are full, also bring his butler along with him? I ... don't think so?
If we say they are all centi-millionaries - and assuming that commercial travel would exist in that case - we still need to consider peer pressure. Every rich golfer can afford golf cart rental to go from tee to tee. But it's part of the sport to walk it, and those who don't, and where there's no health issue or other reason preventing walking, are frowned upon.
Does the King of the Netherlands, in his part-time career as a KLM pilot, use a porter or steward? From what little I could infer, no, he does not. But he does short-haul flights, so that's not really conclusive.
Edit: You wrote: "Even paying someone minimum wage to carry the bag to the airport would be a significant chunk of change."
The upper bound for that is the cost of a taxi ride. The crew member would want to be on the same transport as the luggage.
And for overnights away from home, I believe the airliner pays for hotel and ground transport already.
