The Jet Engine and Leisure Air Travel :: essays research papers

The Jet Engine and Leisure Air TravelAir transport for European tourists got off to a shaky start in the late 1920s.But it was to be thirty years before leisure air extend was to appeal to anyone but the rich and adventurous. lavishly cost, fear of flying and the absence of toilets in early airliners (an unfortunate combination) were the main deterrents the unpressurized aircraft of the inter-war years were noisy, slow and not especially comfortable despite the efforts of some airlines to mold aircraft cabins resemble the first-class state-rooms of an ocean liner. This changed fundamentally after 1958 with the introduction into airline service of the Boeing 707, the Douglas DC-8 and the de Havilland Comet 4, aircraft were capable of flying fast, high and with hitherto unknown smoothness. The resinous age had arrived. This paper considers this age and its impact on tourism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that while the revolution in European leisure air travel that took place i n these years was obviously the result of social and economic change (more disposable income, a greater propensity to take foreign holidays and the accession of new capital into the independent airline industry), there was also a critical additional factor. Thiswas the breakthrough in transport technology represented by the jet engine and it is on this aeronautical artifact that the papers main focus will lie. 1Technological change was crucial to the march of economic and social modernisation in both the 19th and 20 th centuries. New technologies of power generation, manufacturing, transport and communications changed the world and shrunk cartridge holder and space. What is generally termed Fordism grew out of the mass production of automobiles to encompass a whole array of practices and institutions that now underpin modern Western society2. In the wake of Fordist mass production, a Fordist lifestyle of mass consumption set in after 1950 and this included the international touri st industry, the single largest and fastest-growing industry in the world3. The technological change that triggered and accompanied this explosion in tourist activity was the introduction of the jet engine. Indeed the jet engine has been as vital a part of social modernisation as mass tourism itself. The jet engines evolution and dominance in aerospace propulsion since 1950 is traditionally described in terms of the transfer of technology from military to civilian usage the turbo-jet grew out of the Second World War and the conceptualisation for it, and was later installed in civil