No golden age of air travel - Matt Ridley

Whenever somebody gets nostalgic about the past, I get
suspicious. In the eigth century BC, Hesiod was already moaning
about how things aint like they used to be.

The Wall Street Journal has a great article about how nostalgic people get
for the way air travel used to be in the 1950s — with more leg
room, less hassle and more romance.

Piffle. Compard with today, it was expensive, dangerous and
slow:

The piston-driven planes of those
days, like the Lockheed Constellation and Douglas DC-7, were noisy
and often ferociously bumpy. They couldn’t fly over storms and
turbulence the way jet-powered airplanes can. Engine failures were
more frequent. So were crashes. And the cost of a ticket was
affordable for only an elite few.

The 1960s were no picnic either:

In one month alone-January
1969-eight airliners were hijacked to Cuba… The fatal accident
rate per departure in 1969 was 13 times higher than in
2009.

Here’s the Journal’s remarkable table comparing different eras
in flight: