Food in the Air and Space

by Richard Foss

  The oven used in Navy planes will take care of six Sky Plate meals at a time and weighs 33 pounds. It’s not in production yet for retail sale, but tomorrow, or the day after, it will probably sell to housewives for from $15 to $25. Maxson can’t quote any price yet on how much his packaged meals will sell for out of the icebox at the corner grocery store. Too much depends on how quickly the public takes to his idea, and what happens to food prices. The usual rule-of-thumb on prices for frozen foods is that they cost at retail about one and a half times as much as the same foods would set you back if you bought them fresh. Maxson thinks he will be able to sell his meals at about the same price as an average meal at a restaurant. The hard-eating inventor thinks that most of his customers will be people who want to whip up a quick dinner without much trouble. He seems justified in thinking that there are a lot of such people.

  Eventually, the Maxson Sky Plate will be available in 50 different menus. Just now there are only six. The main offerings of these meals are steak, meat loaf, beef stew, corned-beef hash, ham steak and breaded veal cutlets—meat courses of which most home-fronters have only the vaguest memory. Each plate comes with two vegetables, or one vegetable and hot bread. It all tastes good. Several commercial airlines are trying to get Maxson Sky Plates for meal service in the air, but so far the Navy and some Army planes have a monopoly on the product. Meanwhile, other manufacturers are beginning to work out all kinds of packaged meals. The ultimate aim of the manufacturers is to put out a meal in which there will be absolutely no waste. The next big development, obviously, will have to be a precooked, quick-frozen meal that you can eat plate and all. The plate, naturally, will be the dessert and conceivably better than the cake mother used to bake.2

  The end of the war cut Maxson’s military sales, and it took some time for civilian sales to pick up the slack, partly because most grocery stores in that era didn’t have freezers. Pan Am served Sky Plates on a trial basis, and a few other airlines experimented with them. William Maxson developed his ideas with the zeal of a visionary, opening America’s largest trout farm because he thought that trout would be an ideal frozen entrée.

  The first Pan Am commercial flight to serve meals using Maxson’s technology took off in January of 1949,3 but William Maxson didn’t live to see it—he died in July 1947. His heirs didn’t share his enthusiasm for the business and sold the company, and development of the convection oven stalled for almost two decades. Ovens using Maxson’s patents were manufactured by other companies, and as flight kitchens figured out how to make meals that were appropriate for the technology, the quality of food in flight gradually rose.

  The strength of the Maxson convection ovens was that if food had been packaged appropriately, in thin trays that conducted heat, the hot air blowing past them could warm them to about two hundred degrees very quickly. The major disadvantage was that with the heating equipment and fans that were then available, they couldn’t get any hotter. The circulating air also removed moisture from the food, desiccating it if left even a moment too long. Soups, stews, pastas, and meats in sauce were acceptable this way, though vegetables on those same trays tended to overcook. Unfortunately some of the most popular meals in the air, like steaks and lobster, were not well served by this treatment—cooking at low heat in a dry environment made them tough and unappetizing.

  The De Havilland Comet was the first commercial airliner in service, and the first British-built aircraft to have a galley as sophisticated as those aboard American-built rivals. General Electric boasted their technological superiority in this 1959 ad.

  According to General Electric UK, GEC was sold to Marconi, which went bankrupt with no successor

  It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that two different technologies offered a way to improve the inflight dining experience, and though they involved different teams and technologies, both were introduced within a year of each other. The first was an improved convection oven manufactured by the Nordskog Company of Van Nuys, California, where engineers figured out a way to improve the motors for the circulating fans so they wouldn’t be destroyed by high heat. This allowed temperatures as high as five hundred degrees—half what a high-end steakhouse would use for cooking a chunk of beef, but similar to what most restaurants could muster. The ovens were made of aluminum to reduce weight but still came in at a hefty sixty-five pounds due to the layers of insulation, and they cost $33,000 each, both of which were barriers to immediate adoption.

  The first airline to do so was one whose management showed little regard for either finances or practicality. Northeast Airlines had been a successful New England regional carrier until the late 1950s, when they decided to drastically expand and start service to Florida. From that point onward they were in precarious financial health, and in 1965 the carrier was bought by a broadcasting company that sought a way to differentiate them in the market. Superior food seemed like a good bet, so the new ovens were added to their fleet of 727s, and a PR campaign like no other was used to launch the new service. This began by insulting their competitors before lauding their own improvements. A sample, printed in the Montreal Gazette in 1968, was headlined “Jan. 19, 1968—The Beginning of the All-Steak Airline to Florida. The End of Airline Food,” and began,

  It always seemed sad to us that the first and last meals of your vacation, the meals served to you on an airplane, turned out to be the worst meals of your vacation. Sad because airlines don’t start out with inferior food or bad cooks. Their meals just end up tasting that way. Because the meals that are served on planes aren’t cooked on planes. Instead, they’re cooked in big kitchens on the ground, loaded into planes and—one to three hours later—served. Which is why airline food tastes exactly like food that’s been standing around from one to three hours. Your stomach deserves better. Northeast Airlines offers an alternative to airline food. Every one of our Yellowbird jets is now equipped with special broiling ovens. So we can now broil food at 30,000 feet, and the food we broil is steak. Northeast is serving nothing but steak on all our lunch and dinner flights to and from Florida. And not only in first class, but in economy class too. So instead of cutting into pre-cooked airline food, you can cut into freshly broiled steak—filet mignon or club steak in economy, filet mignon or filet of beef tenderloin in first class.4

  The meals were evidently popular but didn’t help the small airline compete with competitors with national route systems. Northeast lost money in every quarter except the one in which their major competitor was on strike, and was sold to Delta in 1972. The high-temperature convection ovens were adopted by other carriers and were often installed only in the first-class galley—economy-class passengers continued to have items reheated at low temperature until the price of the new ovens dropped.

  The other new cooking technology had been under development almost continuously since World War II, but had hitherto been too heavy and unreliable for airline use. The Raytheon Company had started developing the microwave oven prior to 1950 and released the first usable model, the 1611 Radarange, in 1954. That model stood six feet tall and weighed 750 pounds, which made it obviously unsuited to the cramped spaces aboard an aircraft, and each unit was priced at about five thousand dollars.5 Litton Industries was approached by airline companies as early as 1963 for a version that could be used in flight, and teams of engineers worked to reduce the size, weight, cost, and the fragility of the electronics. It wasn’t until 1967 that a compact version suitable to a home countertop went on the market. That exact model might have been usable aboard aircraft, but was not approved by regulators for years due to fears that microwaves could leak out and disrupt the aircraft’s navigational systems.6 The version that was finally certified went into service in 1969, but not without difficulty; it had been loaded with sensors to detect leaking microwaves, and these frequently gave false positives that shut the ovens off. There was another sensor located below the tray where food was set to be cooked. This was designed to keep the oven from being turned on
when it was empty, but it wasn’t sensitive enough and couldn’t detect light items like breakfast Danishes.

  These problems, along with the inexperience of the crews, combined to give microwave cooking a very rocky rollout and made a lasting bad impression. Stewardesses who had never seen a microwave oven before weren’t informed that it should only be used for foods with a high moisture index because the method involved heating water molecules. They tried using it for toast and other dry items, with unfortunate results. The combination of technical problems and insufficient training resulted in a disastrous rollout, but airlines continued to experiment with the new technology. The disadvantage of high power consumption was offset by the fact that heat was instantaneous and the unit itself remained cool, so there was less danger of the cabin crew burning themselves while working in the galley.

  Unfortunately for anyone wanting to sell microwave ovens to airlines, the disadvantages of the technology were overwhelming. Convection ovens were excellent for heating many meals at once; microwaves weren’t. Also, even after a generation of airline crews who grew up with microwave entered the workforce, people still used it inappropriately. Microwave ovens are still installed in aircraft to heat large volumes of water, a task they are ideal for, but these high-power ovens work differently than home versions. In 2007 a British Airways stewardess decided to heat a ready-made curry meal in one of these ovens and caused an inflight emergency and almost $40,000 dollars in damage to the aircraft—the headlines included “Exploding Curry Menaces 747.”7 Besides generating amusing news stories all over the world, the incident resulted in an airline rule that employees would no longer be allowed to heat up their own meals in aircraft kitchens. It’s a problem that is much more unlikely to happen in the convection ovens, most of which have been specially designed to hold containers designed only for that purpose.

  The next innovation in cooking in flight was introduced in 1995, when a company called B/E Aerospace fitted convection ovens with steam injectors so food could cook quickly without being dried out. The ability to cook at a variety of temperatures in either a dry or moist environment was hailed as the solution to a problem that had bedeviled airlines for decades.8 The flying boat stewards who wrestled whole beef roasts and carved them in flight could have only wished they had such technologies.

  chapter 14

  Jumbo Jets, Excess, and Cultural Expression (1966–1975)

  When the Boeing 747 was introduced in 1966, it was a revolutionary aircraft, two and a half times the size of the 707 that had been the standard for the world’s long-haul fleets. Runways had to be lengthened so it could land, airport terminals expanded to hold the 342 passengers that could be flown in what was then the typical configuration. (Later variants would hold more than 400.) Development of the 747 had taxed the ingenuity of the designers and manufacturer and was going to do the same thing to the people who had to figure out how to serve meals aboard.

  The aircraft was developed partly because of a pioneer of the industry—Juan Trippe, who had started Pan Am in 1927 and was still president of the company. Trippe saw the huge airliner as the answer to the problem of airport congestion, and he and Pan Am’s engineers were involved in its design to an unprecedented degree. Pan Am ordered the first planes in April 1966, and the inaugural flight operated in January 1970 between New York and London.

  The 747 utilized one feature that had only previously been seen on the Russian Ilyushin jets—a galley in the belly of the aircraft, with an elevator to carry food up to the passenger level. In these “lower lobe” galleys, trays could be prepared assembly line style in a purely functional space passengers would never see. It was a clever way to use undesirable space and increase the number of seats, and it was vital to serving food for the hundreds of people aboard. For that giant coach compartment, every decision came down to how to save labor. Pan Am, which had the giant aircraft first, had to work out how to allocate staff to feed what had once been a flying restaurant but was now more of a flying mess hall. Former flying boat purser Sam Toaramina found himself in a new position called flight director aboard a 747, overseeing the largest service crew ever assembled aboard one airplane.

  As flight director I think I had 16 or 17 stewardesses on that flight. There would be four people working in the back, another four for the business area, and then the other five or six in first class. . . . And you had the dining room upstairs. You had to put two people up there: you had someone to cook the food, then maybe a helper, because you had 12 people seated upstairs to feed.1

  That upstairs dining room became a signature of Pan Am; though other carriers used the space for additional seating or bars and lounges, Pan Am tried to maintain the gentility of an earlier era. Flight director Jay Koren remembered that he found himself in the unusual position of trying to figure out which passengers would make the kind of interesting dinner party group that he was trying to assemble.

  Selecting those to be seated in the Dining Room was the responsibility of the flight director. After takeoff we passed through the cabin, seat chart in hand, discreetly studying the load to determine which passengers might best fit with which others. Pairs travelling together made the job easy; but, all too often, every passenger in first-class was flying alone. Sometimes during the early months, very few passengers could be persuaded to give our Dining Room a try. They were not in the mood for conversation, they had a good book to finish, or they simply preferred to eat in the privacy of their main deck seats. On one such flight the ever lustrous Julie Andrews and her husband Blake Edwards were among our guests. No one wanted to dine upstairs. Finally I cajoled the Edwards’ into trying our new innovation, and we soon had a full Dining Room. As often happened, even well after the meal service was completed, the diners were having such a good time that we had to begin the movie downstairs without them! Word quickly spread among the travel agents and Pan Am’s most sophisticated customers. Soon, advance reservations for the Dining Room became the custom when booking the flight. Flight Directors no longer needed to talk diners into climbing the stairs, though we continued to work out the seating and to print and position place cards. I did have my fun putting Arabs with Israelis, Dionne Warwick and a Liverpudlian rock star with Lord and Lady Lilywhite. We never heard any complaints. The Dining Room seemed to pull people together, to generate a spirit of camaraderie.2

  The food served upstairs was the same as served to passengers who remained in their seats, and it was excellent—there was always carved roast beef, plus six choices that might include Sole Albert, Lobster Thermidor, Lamb Chops, and Chicken Maryland. Throughout the service, wine glasses were replenished frequently, including with Cristal or Dom Pérignon Champagne. The last three carts presented a selection of cheeses and fruits, desserts, liqueurs, and cognac. It was a magnificent meal that took two hours to serve and clear, deliberately as different as possible from what was being served on the other side of the curtain. There, as noted succinctly in Flight Catering, “Due to the large quantity of meals that needed to be produced, the food became simpler.” All economy-class cold items were preloaded on one tray, a hot entrée was added as each plate came out of the convection oven, and it was served out as quickly as possible.

  The pattern Pan Am set was duplicated as other carriers got their 747s, with minor differences in the utilization of the upper deck. Air Canada used it as a bar for first-class passengers, BOAC as a lounge with a microwave oven in the middle so passengers could heat meals at any time they wanted during the flight. (This was discontinued after a short time because the microwave ovens proved too unreliable.)3 In 1970 Japan Airlines introduced an upper deck lounge called Teahouse in the Sky, where passengers were served hot or cold sake and their choice of elaborately crafted Japanese delicacies. The airline was already adept at this—a travel article the year before commented on pastries “made from a soft baked flour mixed with egg and containing excellent sweet red bean paste added with a little pulp of plums. The design on the pa
stry is of a ‘Straw Thatched House In The Japanese Countryside’. [It is] . . . wrapped in an attractive simple packet. It tastes very good and it looks very good too.”4

  JAL’s focus on creating a uniquely Japanese experience in the sky represented quite a turnaround in style, as not too long before this they had been serving almost exclusively European food even on their domestic routes. A menu from a 1966 flight between Tokyo and Okinawa offered a lunch of salad followed by marinated prawns, chicken galantine with glazed carrots, Brussels sprouts, braised potatoes, and a “bavarois panache”; although the prawns may have been made in Japanese style, the only certain element of that culture was the green tea served afterward.5 By the mid-1970s JAL was serving authentic cuisine as one option, while maintaining the French-styled alternative for those who preferred it.

  There was no question that you were among the elite when you were served custom-carved charcuterie and smoked salmon aboard SAS in the 1960s.

  Image provided by SAS Museum, Oslo

  JAL was far from the only one to invest in 747s. Airlines around the world rushed to sign orders with Boeing, and most carriers got them just in time for a recession and huge increases in fuel prices. As they had already bought the aircraft and needed to fill them, preferably with high-paying passengers, all carriers entered into a scramble to see who could offer the most luxurious experience for the thirty passengers in the front cabin. To go into details of all of these in this book would be tiresome and repetitive—most were minor variations of the standards set by Pan Am and described above, with the only interesting elements being the non-European dishes served in addition to the standard international menu. Those who are interested in information at this depth are advised to seek a copy of George Banks’s wonderful Gourmet and Glamour in the Sky, listed along with other frequently cited books in the Recommended Reading list at the back of this book.