Open Writing

This past summer, Sandra and I visited the Yale Center for British Art in Newhaven, Connecticut. For a comparatively small museum, it contains a wonderfully representative collection of British art through the centuries. Sculptures by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth vie for your attention with paintings by Whistler, Constable and Eduard Lear. Grand portraits of nobility compete with pictures of notable steeplechase thoroughbreds and stirring naval engagements.
It’s a rich feast, set in stark, modern galleries, which demonstrate very well that poured concrete can be beautiful.

Featured this summer was a selection of transport posters from the donated collection of Henry S. Hacker. Many of them advertised the London Underground, at that time a fairly modest undertaking. Nevertheless, the posters proclaimed excitedly that one could now travel in comfort for a day out at Kew Gardens, or the Tower of London, and other, comparatively nearby destinations, as if one were crossing a continent.

The Art Deco style of these posters is immediately recognizable, and was used to great effect by the railways, shipping companies like Cunard, and the putative future of air travel: the airship and the seaplane. Interestingly, the style has re-emerged in contemporary posters publicizing the US Amtrack railroad. Most of the advertising for these early forms of mass transportation projected elegance, comfort and convenience. One has to wonder what happened to those lofty standards.

The majority of my own travel has been related to business – first by rail, later by car, and only after I had reached the age of 35, by air. My first trip was literally a hedgehop from Manchester in England to Glasgow, Scotland. I remember feeling very apprehensive. I’m not good at heights, and have been dogged on and off by motion sickness, so I was convinced this experience would be my undoing.

As it turned out the trip was very enjoyable, and in a way a bit of a letdown in that I didn’t experience any of the sensations I had anticipated, though I was grateful. It was thrilling to fly over Glasgow on a clear, dark night, and see the football stadium looking like an emerald in the floodlights, flecked with a scatter of ant-like players.

My plane trips continued to be of short duration until, at age 40, I moved to the USA, when my real air travel career began. This was now the 1970’s, and air travel was so different then that it seems unreal. Seats were comfortable, real food was served, and the drinks were FREE! Yes, free. Can you imagine? The operations were dogged by some of the glitches that still exist today – lost baggage, delayed departures, etc., but by and large the experience was a joy compared with contemporary flying.

Planes were seldom full to capacity, and if I missed one flight there’d be another within the hour, and if not on the airline I had booked, then they would transfer me to another.

Increases in fuel costs, the cost of the airplanes themselves, the rising wages of employees, and, I suspect, the consolidation of airline companies, has gradually eroded the pleasure of flying. Nowadays I’m reluctant to fly, and when I have to, cringe at the prospect.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, I travelled overseas frequently for business and pleasure, and would try to book flights on the airlines of the countries I was visiting. Thus I would fly Lufthansa to Germany, British Airways to England, Air France to Paris and Lyon and so on. This gave me an opportunity to sample the cultural flavors of each and compare the services.

If I had to rank them I would place Korean Airlines and Singapore Airlines as joint firsts, followed right behind by British Airways and Lufthansa, with Air France a close third.

For international air travel, the American companies just didn’t have it at the time, though Northwest was trying very hard.

Quite the worst companies were Sabina and KLM, mostly due to the poor attitude of the flight attendants and the management.

At the peak of my air travel, airlines were competing for business class travelers, and I was fortunate enough to be able to fly that class. Sometimes their efforts to spoil business class passengers went just a little too far. Air France, in particular, would wine and dine its business class passengers all night crossing the Atlantic, so by the time I arrived I would be groggy with too much food and wine, and too little sleep.

Probably my most memorable flight was from Singapore to Frankfurt in Germany. It was during a time when employers were cutting back on expenses, so business class passengers were few and far between. On this trip we had one very beautiful Singaporean flight attendant per passenger. It was the closest I will ever come to realizing the promise of those elegant posters from yesteryear.

# # #