by Richard Foss
Pan Am had lost their monopoly on international flights but continued as the dominant carrier between the United States and the rest of the world. Though they still operated some seaplane services with the last generation of flying boats, they also adopted the Stratocruiser and DC-4s. The latter had the first tray tables that folded down from the backs of the seats, and old hands who had been used to setting up elaborate contraptions aboard flying boats were pleased by the ease of working aboard these aircraft. They also liked the efficiency of frozen food—as steward Sam Toaramina remarked,
We had a little oven, about 24 inches long and 16 or 18 inches high and little shelves in it. . . . It might have held 6 to 8 meals, and you took those out, took the foil off of them, put them on a tray, and that was your meal. Just take the foil off and give it to the passenger—Oh, and add a roll to it and a salad, a little salad that was already prepared. I could carry two in one hand and one in the other so I could feed three people at a time, go back and get three more, and keep doing that until we finished the whole airplane. Passengers had a little tray that folded down from the back of the seat, it was very small, I’d say 12 x 12” or so. It was an easy meal to do, you had nothing to do . . .2
The stewards no longer had to carry trays after Pan Am adopted an innovation pioneered by BOAC—a wheeled trolley that could carry food and drink for meal services but could be folded and stored when not needed. This was invented by an engineer named Stan Bruce, and it made service faster and more reliable because staff no longer had to balance the trays while walking down the aisle.3
In 1948 it was possible to get breakfast in bed for a “modest surcharge” on Pan Am’s around-the-world flights.
Airline bankrupt, permission given by EverythingPanAm
The simpler service in these and later aircraft allowed a reduction in staff—instead of the crews of eight to ten cabin personnel, Pan Am’s DC-4s could operate with as few as two service staff and a purser. The latter spent much of his time dispensing another innovation; the first airline miniature bottles, which at first sold for thirty-five cents each. There was theoretically a limit on these, but in practice passengers could usually get as many as they wanted.
Pan Am also served Champagne for free, though the carrier was plagued with employee pilferage of the expensive wine. Former Pan Am Pacific Division chief Anthony Olanio recalled that when he was a passenger on a flight in the early ’50s, the staff weren’t offering refills as they were supposed to. He found out that the extra bottles were being saved for the wedding of one of the stewardesses—when Olanio looked in a closet in the crew quarters in Hawaii, he found “bottles and bottles of the bubbly stuff, enough to float a battleship.”4
Pan Am did their best to maintain the standard of service they had pioneered in the prewar era, and they prospered despite competition from the flood of new entrants. In part this was because they had a trusted brand, in part because some of their competitors were forced to operate most services for political reasons rather than economic ones. The British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese national carriers operated a route system that connected current and former colonies with the mother country, even if there was little traffic. The finances of most of these carriers were deliberately opaque, but it is safe to say that all of them lost money on most of their worldwide operations. As a result, they became increasingly interested in attracting passengers on those routes that offered some chance of actually making a profit. In the early 1950s most of those were across the Atlantic, and since most carriers were flying identical American-built aircraft, the only way they could compete was on the basis of service. Before the introduction of frozen food, this involved a high level of individual choice that could only be achieved by onboard cooking. On the fourteen-hour flight from London to New York on BOAC, passengers could request their roast beef rare, medium, or well-done, and their breakfast eggs were cooked to order. Drinks flowed freely, and stewardesses poured fine wines for delighted passengers who had never known such luxury.
The cost of providing this type of service became ruinous even for carriers that had substantial government support, and in 1951 the trade association for the major airlines, the International Airline Transport Association (IATA), met in Nice, France, to consider what to do. They were faced with increasing competition from charter operations that only served profitable markets and siphoned off budget-conscious leisure travelers, leaving them to compete with each other for demanding business passengers. At that meeting the carriers agreed to an innovation: a separate compartment aboard their aircraft for tourist-class passengers, who would accept a lower standard of service in exchange for lower fares.5 Originally it was decided that passengers would pay for meals, but the agreement was almost immediately amended to make them free.
In order to prevent airlines from raising standards in tourist class to poach business from competitors, the amenities that could be offered were carefully spelled out. The detailed restrictions, called “Conditions of Service,” included the definition of a lunch or dinner as follows:
One glass of fruit juice or one cup of soup or one canapé.
One entrée main course with two vegetables or one vegetable and a salad.
One piece of fruit or one pastry or one piece of chocolate.
Bread, butter, biscuits and cheese.
Drinks had to be charged for in economy class, and any additional items given to passengers—even in first class—had to be shown to be “for use on board.”6
Had all of the airlines that were signatory to these pacts actually rigorously enforced them, food in flight worldwide might have become as boring as the endless parade of cold fried chicken lunches that greeted most airline travelers in the late 1920s. However, as soon as the ink was dry on the agreement, airlines started figuring out ways of circumventing the rules without actually violating them.
As an example, in 1952 KLM started serving genever gin in specially designed Delft blue porcelain bottles made in the shape of traditional Dutch houses. The shape and style of these beautiful bottles was varied, and the ninety-three different porcelain houses quickly became collector’s items. Other airlines cried foul, citing the section of the conditions of service that specified that no gifts be given to passengers. KLM’s management argued straight-faced that they were allowed to give out free drinks, and nothing in the rules said they had to be served in a glass. It was later pointed out that on flights to Muslim countries where no alcohol was served, KLM gave the ceramic houses out empty, but no protests could make the Dutch stop.7
The British carrier BOAC, which was one of the instigators of the restrictions, was also in violation of them during 1952, the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In that year they offered an “Elizabethan” meal service as a celebration—as a former employee wrote on the Stewardist website, an online forum for retired airline personnel, “if I recall correctly, they offered some fifteen courses, most of them meat. (Try doing that as a Buy-On-Board service).” It didn’t last long but roast beef, presented on a trolley with all the trimmings and carved at your seat by the purser, was a staple of BOAC/British Airways catering for years.8
The agreement had specified the amenities in tourist class with the expectation that all carriers would continue operating their first-class service as it had been. There was nothing in the rules about offering an even more luxurious service, so in 1952 Air France debuted a premium cabin aboard the first aircraft configured for three-class service. This service had different names depending on the route—“Epicurien” on the London service, “Etoile de Dakar” on flights to Senegal, and “Parisien Special” on flights to New York. The meals were lavish, with items like truffled foie gras and trout with tarragon served on Limoges porcelain, and brandy and liqueurs served after meals.9 Air France hauled out the old description of their London service as a “flying restaurant,” boasting that their menus changed daily. In 1953 British European Airways responded with Silver W
ing service on the routes where they competed, serving rare whiskies after similarly sumptuous meals that might include lobster mayonnaise, roast beef, white asparagus, petit fours, and banana splits. Despite the fact that the food wasn’t quite as fancy, those flights became more popular because BEA was flying the new Vickers Viscount turboprop aircraft, which were quieter, faster, and had less vibration.
These premium services were principally offered on routes where the airlines faced competition, but on routes where the airlines had monopolies, passengers endured inferior food aboard older, slower aircraft. On many of these, inflight service was nonexistent. As late as 1954 it was estimated that 40 percent of all passenger flights still stopped for meals rather than serving them in flight. This continued for a surprisingly long time—as late as the 1980s Air Afrique flights from Dakar to Kinshasa stopped for two hours for lunch in Lomé and again for dinner in Libreville.10
Despite the IATA agreements, the level of competition gradually rose, as airlines that flew routes that were seasonally unpopular piled on the amenities to sell their connecting service. The prime example was SAS, whose management knew that very few tourists would want to visit freezing Scandinavia in fall and winter. They resolved to offer service so good that passengers would decide to take a connecting flight through Stockholm or Copenhagen on their trips from the United States to southern Europe, rather than a nonstop flight on an airline with a reputation for inferior service. They did this by creative interpretation of the meaning of the word “sandwich” to include an entire traditional smorgasbord as long as it was served on top of bread. Stewardesses came through the aisles with platters of shrimp, caviar, lobster, and other delicacies, all followed by shots of traditional aquavit. For several years SAS offered extraordinary service while their competitors grumbled and growled. Other carriers tried to upscale their own meals with similarly creative definitions of the term, in a comical episode that came to be known as the “sandwich wars.”
It all came to a head in 1958, when someone in SAS’s sales department sent an intemperately worded letter to prospective business clients, which included the line, “On our planes you won’t find rubbery indigestables wrapped in cellophane.” The letter got around, and eventually a copy wound up in the hands of an executive at TWA, who blew his top. That executive contacted the airlines’ legal department, and in short order a lawsuit for defamation was in the works. Eventually a $20,000 fine was slapped on SAS, and an emergency meeting of IATA was convened to resolve the situation. After two full days of argument in London, it was ruled that a sandwich must be “cold, largely of bread or something similar, unadorned, self-contained, and must not include such fillings as caviar, oysters, or lobster.”11 It was a fittingly ridiculous end to one of the most absurd battles in the history of regulation.
Besides this sort of rule bending, the carriers that formed IATA had to deal with other companies that had not joined their cartel, and hence were not bound by its rules. These carriers were called non-IATA airlines, and by being outside that club those carriers lost the ability to broadly interchange tickets, sell their flights using the common ticket stock, and be a member of certain revenue-sharing deals.12 They could, however, undercut the rates set by IATA and set their own standards of service. In the case of many airlines that faced no competition, standards and fares were both rock-bottom, but some managed to innovate. One of the most famous of these was the Icelandic carrier Loftleidir, which offered extremely low prices on one-class flights between American East Coast cities and smaller cities in Europe. All flights made a stop in Iceland, and after the sandwich wars, Loftleidir took advantage of the company’s Scandinavian heritage and presented a more modest imitation of the famed SAS smorgasbord. It was a way to draw passengers to an airline that simultaneously boasted of their cheap fares and admitted their tendency to run off-schedule with a 1960s PR campaign that advertised, “Slowest But Lowest.”13
Another carrier that sought to attract passengers based on food quality was Malayan Airways, the predecessor of Malaysian Airways. Unlike Air India, they served primarily Western food—hot tomato soup just after takeoff, followed by chicken casserole, parsley potatoes, and vegetables, then fresh fruit, coffee, and tea.14 One of their competitors was Philippine Airways, which initiated an aggressive expansion that included flights to Europe and the USA. At various times they apparently offered a choice of European or Filipino-style food on their international flights, but their operations were chaotic due to graft-ridden and incompetent management.15
None of the charter lines that competed with both IATA and the non-IATA carriers made any attempt to provide interesting food, preferring to compete only on price. These carriers ceded the business and luxury market to their scheduled competitors, but the system did not change in response. The pattern of multiple-class flights had been set for long-distance international operations by major carriers, and with rare exceptions it was to remain that way.
Ads to attract businesspeople in the 1950s were unabashedly sexist. Comparable ads aimed at women during this era tended to emphasize visiting family members.
Image from author’s collection
The international initiatives to standardize multiclass travel were mirrored inside the United States, but as with the changes to the American airmail subsidy system, things were started by an aggressive federal bureaucrat. Major airlines had instituted coach service as early as 1948, but this was limited to flights at unpopular times, and all travelers experienced the same level of service on those flights. Those flights were designed to put pressure on the bane of the majors’ existence: the non-skeds. Those carriers were highly unreliable but extremely cheap and threatened to reduce the public perception of air service, and the major carriers hated them. Scheduled airline operators wanted the non-skeds put out of business so that they would be able to conduct orderly operations for their business-oriented clientele, and were shocked when the bureaucrat who regulated their industry said that they needed to make changes themselves. To compete with the non-skeds, he theorized, the scheduled airlines would have to offer service that was cheaper and would entice new passengers aboard their flights. They could do that by expanding a product many of them already offered: reduced fares on inconveniently timed flights. These went under the name of coach or economy service.
In a speech in 1950, Donald Nyrop, the chairman of the American Civil Aeronautics Board, noted that only one-third of scheduled airline passengers were on pleasure trips, and said “Coach service is an effort to increase public acceptance of air travel.” The next year he issued a policy statement that announced that certificated (i.e., scheduled) airlines would be expected to expand their coach services.16 Most carriers were against this idea, with United Airlines president William Patterson initially a fervent opponent, but he was persuaded that the proposed fare cut of 30 percent for the tourist-class flights would increase traffic and help drive the non-sked carriers out of existence. It is hard to establish the degree to which it did, since shortly after the regime went into practice several non-sked carriers suffered crashes or highly public failures to operate. In any case, within five years the non-sked market had collapsed, though more regular charter operations continued to thrive. Though the competition had disappeared, tourist-class flights didn’t, as the airlines figured out that the same square footage of the more densely packed economy-class cabin produced the identical revenue as first class. Meals in economy were initially sold for $1.50, slightly more than they actually cost, and were not a large part of the calculation.
The CAB’s actions to promote discounted travel occurred at the same time the agency was allocating routes in a way that effectively froze out the ability of new carriers to start scheduled service. As a result, the established carriers didn’t have to worry about new competitors, and they were allowed to focus on building their brands. They did this with food and beverage service.
One of the first innovators was Western Airlines, which was b
randed as “The Champagne Airline” and started serving that beverage to all passengers in 1952.17 This was unusual, because some carriers didn’t serve alcohol of any kind on domestic flights until several years later. TWA served Champagne between Los Angeles and Chicago to compete with Western, but not on most other domestic flights until 1957.18
Western’s decision to serve Champagne on all flights was not without its technical challenges. The first time they tried serving bubbly and a meal on flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco, they found that it took about an hour and fifty minutes to serve the whole planeload of people—fourteen minutes longer than was available. Flights services director Richard Ensign came up with various ways to speed the process, including opening one-third of the bottles before takeoff and pouring at the passengers’ seats rather than pouring in the galley and serving from a tray. These and other innovations shaved off fifteen minutes, so the service could be delivered as promised.19
Western upgraded inflight services so they could compete with United on West Coast routes, at the time one of the few year-round competitive markets in the United States. The management instituted a choice of meals on flights, a rarity in those days, and served salad, a choice of seafood or filet mignon, vegetable, and dessert. Gifts helped seal the deal—Western-branded cigars were handed out to the men, and perfume to women. Western also introduced the oddest meal-based promotion to date: “Hunt Breakfasts,” for which the stewardesses donned red coats and black hats so they would look like English fox hunters. In case the clothing didn’t tip off passengers to the theme, a tape recorder hidden in the bottom of the service cart blasted the sound of bugles blowing and hounds barking. The service was wildly popular, but a decision by the FAA to outlaw the use of the tape recorder ended it.20