To travel the skies today is as innate as sipping on a chai latte. Jetting across the world upon a chair suspended 30,000 feet above the ground, all while enjoying a dry Martini, has become the norm. Once reserved to describe the rich and famous, the words ‘jet set’ have entered our common jargon. However, air travel hasn’t always been painless and unstrained. Once upon...
I have always felt that there is something cosy and homey about the color schemes of the 1970s. Dark and powerful earth colors dominated the design of the corporate, home and commercial western world. From shopping malls, to the basement den to the airport. So, follow us as we visit some airports of the period to experience what checking in was like in the 1970s....
Every mid-century maven knows Pan Am. All swank jet-setting dreams began with the famed airline. The first to employ luxury jetliners (Boeing 707s in 1958 and Boeing 747s in 1970), Pan Am was one of the founders of the commercial Jet Age. With 86 destination countries on all six major continents at its peak in 1968, the Pan Am name was synonymous with style, luxury,...
In 1964 my father accepted a job as Press Secretary for Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, so my family left the Arizona desert outside of Phoenix for the foothills of the great Blue Ridge Mountains of Fairfax, Virginia, approximately thirty miles from Washington D.C. and approximately thirty miles from the newly emerging Dulles International Airport that straddled Fairfax and Loudoun Counties. Northern Virginia was in...
For those of you who are waiting to get away over the summer, here’s some inspiration. This “Look at life” video clip from The Rank Organisation dated May 1964, tells us about air travel in England from Heathrow Airport featuring classic BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) and BEA airplanes. Look at Life was a regular British series of short documentary films of which over 500...
The first of its kind, Airport set the standard for the disaster films of the 1970s. Films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and my favorite – Rollercoaster (1977) collected A-list, B-list, and C-list movie stars and put them into some pretty crummy situations. But their pain is our pleasure; the films grossed a ton of money – Airport made over...
The JFK Trans World Airlines (TWA) terminal was designed by the great Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Built in a very modernist and expressionistic style it was completed in 1962 and set the standard for how modern jet travel was perceived back in its glory days. You might have seen the building in a handful of movies, everything from Hell up in Harlem, Death Wish to...
