Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience (review)

Machines are made to be used, but histories of technology rarely capture—much less focus on—the user’s experience. The smell of purple-inked copies fresh from a spirit duplicator, the syncopated rhythm of a rotary phone being dialed, and the look of television “snow” are not easily reduced to words. Once-familiar bits of practice, known to every user of a once-ubiquitous technology, fall into obscurity as the technology fades from use. The proper technique for adjusting an engine choke, achieving uniform margins with a typewriter, or sending a message with semaphore flags are documented now only in dusty manuals and fading memories. Daniel L. Rust sets out, in Flying Across America, to document the history of passenger air travel in the United States from the user’s point of view. Posing a deceptively simple question—“What did it feel like to travel long distances by air?”—he answers it with a mosaic of details drawn from corporate records, advertisements, contemporary news stories, and firsthand accounts. Both in its text and its abundant illustrations, Flying Across America offers historians of aviation a wealth of material that has never been readily available before.

The book is at its best when it is at its most concrete and specific. Rust’s discussions of in-flight food and beverage service, of timetables and ticket prices, and of marketing gimmicks are matchless. He has a storyteller’s eye for fascinating details—the ubiquity of chicken sandwiches as meals, a passenger’s elaborate efforts to circumvent the industry’s long-standing ban on alcoholic drinks, a 1954 airline-funded study showing that flying coast-to-coast was no more expensive than riding the bus—and scrupulously documents each one. Flying Across America covers marquee innovations like stewardesses and in-flight movies, but also the introduction of often-overlooked features such as public-address systems, reserved seats, checked baggage, window shades, and enclosed overhead bins. The illustrations, shown to advantage by the volume’s oversized glossy pages, are an artful mixture of the spectacular (full-page, full-color advertisements) and the mundane-but-rare (timetables and ticket envelopes). Most will be unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated air-travel historians, and many depict ephemera from the author’s own collection. The footnotes are copious and the seven-page, double-column bibliography encompasses long-forgotten primary sources as well as the standard histories of airlines, airliners, and air travel.

One of the most valuable aspects of Flying Across America is the way it complicates the long-cherished belief in a “golden age” when air travel was a joy and passengers felt like royalty. Rust’s close attention to the relationship between passenger comfort and corporate profits shows that experiments with low-cost, no-frills air travel began soon after wartime travel restrictions were lifted in 1945, driven by consumer demand rather than corporate parsimony. He also quotes the air travelers of the supposed golden age as they complain about bad food, deafening noise, sweltering cabins, and overnight flights interrupted by refueling stops. Until the jet age, Rust concludes on page 192, “the myth of comfort aboard transcontinental airliners was just that—a myth.”

Rust handles unfamiliar topics—non-scheduled airlines, the view from cabin windows, gender-driven marketing—with such aplomb that it is deeply frustrating when Flying Across America veers away from them and into the familiar. One-page histories of airlines and aircraft manufacturers—presented, like magazine sidebars, on separate, colored pages—break up both the visual unity and the narrative flow of the book. Long in-text discussions of everything from the 1931 air-crash death of Knute Rockne to the history of the turbojet engine do less violence to the aesthetic but more to the narrative. These digressions are neither necessary nor particularly valuable: Flying Across America is a history of the experience of air travel, not of the airline industry. The space expended on them would have...