One night in the summer of 1968 I boarded a Boeing 707 at the old TWA terminal at JFK in New York city and headed for Geneva. As I waited that evening in the lounge area, I noticed that there didn’t appear to be many passengers, and once on the plane I learned I was right.
Besides the flight crew, there were only six other passengers, conveniently spread out through the plane.
In the days, before airline deregulation in the late 1970s, the old Civil Aeronaurics Board crawled all over flight schedules requiring airlines to fly all kinds of unprofitable routes while attempting to leave enough crumbs for them to still make an overall profit. It was a mess, and sometimes — frequently as I recall — passengers would climb on airplanes and be outnumbered by the flight crew, not that the flight crew cared. Less passengers = less work.
In those more gentile days flight attendants were stewardesses, and were young, lithe and sweetly bedecked out in white gloves. Flying was quite civilized. The airlines catered to passengers; this was long before passengers were eyed and surveilled as if we were all terroriists, or aspiring to be such.
There were several versions of the 707, but by today’s standards the number of passengers was quaint — roughly 140, or slightly more than the 137 seats that Southwest has in most of its Boeing 737s — and significantly less than Southwest will have on the 737-800s they plan to begin flying in 2011 or 2012. In part this was because there was room between seats. Cram the seats closer and an airline company can pack in a lot more passengers.
consider this is a works in progress …
Diary 2023 