What’s wrong with this picture?
There’s a popular image on Twitter at the moment, labelled as “Economy Class on Pan Am 747 in the late 60’s”
Air travel, especially in the United States, was much more luxurious then, but there are some problems with this picture.
The easy ones: the picture as posted by @HistoryInPics has no attribution. It’s also mislabelled, and has been converted to black and white to make it look more period. The original (via @hypatiadotca) is a Boeing promotional photo of a mock-up of the 747 cabin.
Presumably the mock-up was done with Pan Am and their customers in mind, since Pan Am were the big customer, but that’s not the same thing at all. And the 747 wasn’t used in the 1960s — that’s what I noticed, since I know the first test-flight of the 747 was the year I was born.
Now we’ve got that out of the way, the StatsChat-relevant aspect of the picture is the dramatic fall in the price of flying over the years. In the 1960s Pan Am used to charge about US$500 for a round-trip from New York to London. Adjusted for inflation, that’s nearly US$4000 now, which would get you a much nicer business-class ticket. In terms of median income the fall in price is even greater, and much greater in terms of the income of the sort of people who used to fly in the 1960s.
My parents moved from the UK to Australia in the mid-1960s. It was ten years before they next saw their families. That’s what has really changed about flying.
[Update: 2014-5-30 @HistoryinPics has excelled themselves (screenshot)]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
On reflection, it’s possible that there were black and white originals as well as the colour ones, so I may have over-reacted on that aspect. If they had any attribution it might have been possible to tell.
11 years ago
The best equivalent of an ‘economy class’ trip from New York to London would probably be a tourist class berth on an ocean liner, rather than an extravagant flight – but I can’t find how much such a berth might have cost in the 60’s.
11 years ago
I happen to know that in 1974 a berth on a liner from the UK to Melbourne for two adults and three small children was still cheaper than flying (taking 6 weeks food, etc, into account) but not by much. I just learned from Wikipedia that the ship (RHMS Britanis) was taken off liner work to become a cruise ship the following year, and that the company ended its UK/Australia line in 1977.
Presumably in the 1960s, before the 747, the economics would have been rather less favorable to flying.
11 years ago
It occurs to me that the costs can’t have been all that different, based on this Flanders & Swann piece from the early 1960’s
Swann and I have had to do quite a lot of flying lately – by air – and I must say it’s rather marvelous when you think of it, isn’t it, that, you know, if you want to go to New York, say, instead of lying about for days on end, like in a sort of floating Selfridges, doing nothing, eating far too much, all you have to do is just jump on a plane, seventeen miles outside London at two o’ clock in the morning. You’ll be . . . you can be in New York too late for breakfast and just in time to go to bed at noon.
They don’t mention expense anywhere, which does suggest that the cost of flying wasn’t outrageously higher than the cost of a liner.
11 years ago