Mostly Cajun reminded us that Sunday was the 74th anniversary of Pan Am's China Clipper's first trans pacific flight.
Anything airplane fascinates me and I would have loved to been on the first flight from San Francisco to Honolulu to Midway to Wake to Guam to Manilla. The aircrat crusied around 175 knots with a ceiling of around 19000 feet. Not exactly fast but I bet the food and beverage was first class and those four props could lull you to sleep like nothing else.
My first Pan Am flight was in the late 60's on a 707 from JFK to London's Heathrow where I changed to an Aerflot converted bomber for a flight into Moscow courtesy of the Department of State. I did it several times more and was always fascinated by the fact that the aircraft clearly had bomb bay doors and a bubble navigation port in the top of the cabin for silent navigation by the stars. The Soviets didn't worry about public opinion.
The flights were all without incident and they served some good cheese and better vodka. But the plastic didn't match well around the windows and the seats weren't well secured to the floor. Those were not confidence builders.
Later I made quite a few other flights from JFK into Brussels on Pan Am. Take off at 7:00 PM from JFK and land around 6:00 AM give or take. Supposedly you could make a 9:00 AM meeting to show your vigor and attaboy attitude. I never did and it didn't seem to make any difference. Of course I was dealing mostly with the French and the US Departmnent of State and their work ethic wasn't exactly Americanized.
The flights were never full and you could always eat, drink, flip some arm rests up and sleep until wakened for an orange juice and roll breakfast. No Virginia, in those days the peons did not fly first class.
Pan Am wasn't allowed to fly inside the US. Why I don't know. TWA was.
In any event deregulation let them start doing that but they couldn't compete and finally went out of business. My last flight on them was from LAX to Ohau and was memorable in that the pilot took off and flew right into a thunderstrom about 10 miles off the coast. He could have deviated 10 degrees either way and missed it, but he didn't and the turblence was so bad that the oxygen masks deployed and many of the overhead bins popped open. And this was in a 747.
He never said a word beyond announcing we were returning to LAX. But to paraphrase a Contiental pilot who also did a dummie of the day thing flying from LAX to DIA, "Uh, that was a little worse than I thought it would be."
I had a flight about a month ago on a Delta Northwest or was it a Northwest Delta on a 320 Airbus RT to LAX. First Class all the way and it was worse than those Pan Am flights 40 years ago. But if that was bad, think of flying in this:
The best description I can think of this is, "Looks good but will feel bad." But then I am getting older and my sense of adventure has fled. Along with the good wine and food they once served.
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