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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we continue our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We're entering the home stretch with thing number 90, 100 years of commercial air travel. Most of us are familiar with the start of this story, right? December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers become the first humans to successfully fly an airplane, but what happened between then and now?

We have airports all across the country, of course, and the world. You can get practically anywhere in the continental United States within a matter of hours by flying, except maybe if you're traveling via Newark Airport at the moment. Air travel still has its complications. With us now to walk us through the last 100 years of air travel is Bob van der Linden, commercial aviation curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Bob, what a treat to have you. Welcome to WNYC.

Bob van der Linden: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: We'll start just a little before our timeline of 100 years. January 1st, New Year's Day, 1914, the first scheduled commercial flight. Tell us where it went, where it originated.

Bob van der Linden: Yes, it might surprise people. It went across Tampa Bay. It was the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. It lasted three months from January 1st, 1914 to the end of March 1914.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, it flew from St. Petersburg to Tampa?

Bob van der Linden: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: That's like flying from Brooklyn to Queens.

Bob van der Linden: Yes, but they had no other way to get there other than train. It would take hours by train. This would take minutes. It was a success.

Brian Lehrer: Who was on board that flight, if you know?

Bob van der Linden: The former mayor. I forgot his first name. Last name was Bhiel, B-H-I-E-L, something like that.

Brian Lehrer: They were basically making a show of, "We can do this."

Bob van der Linden: Well, it was actually a regular service and it ran for three months, accident-free, cost $5. That was a lot of money in 1914, but it saved an immense amount of time. They did it one passenger at a time. It was a flying boat, a small flying boat with the pilot and spare seat. That spare seat is what the passenger went in. What makes it the first airline? You had to pay for it, but it was regularly scheduled. You just didn't walk up and go, "Hey, let's go to Tampa." It's like, "No, you can leave at noon. You can leave at whatever." It worked and it worked very successfully. Carried quite a few people.

Brian Lehrer: All right.

Bob van der Linden: They would have continued it, but they're doing it during the winter months down in Florida. While we weren't involved in World War I until 1917, they decided because of the war, they wouldn't continue in 1915. They just disappeared after that anywhere in the world.

Brian Lehrer: If that was the first anywhere in the world, commercial flight, and it was 1914, what was the rollout of more commercial flights, some of the other firsts or, geographically, how it started to expand in the United States?

Bob van der Linden: Well, it took a while in the United States. The oldest airline still in operation today is KLM out of the Netherlands. The second oldest is Avianca in Colombia, which got started as SCADTA back in 1919 and 1920 for those two airlines. They had government support, especially KLM. In Europe, post-World War I, they had, in Europe, war surplus, large bombers that they converted to passenger service and actually had decent service across the English Channel and throughout Europe within a couple of years.

All of which was subsidized, at least in case of the-- not the British for a while, but the French and the Dutch and the Belgians. Then in the United States, though, it didn't work out quite that way. Many people tried to fly airlines, but they were not subsidized. They all failed very quickly. The only one that hung around for a while was an airline called Aeromarine. They flew converted military flying boats. Actually, they're very comfortable-looking. Their big biplanes carried quite a few people in comfort.

They lasted from 1920, '21 to 1924, flying into Canada and then flying from Florida into the Bahamas. That might seem like an odd route. If you remember that Prohibition was on then. This airline made a great deal of money carrying passengers to Canada where they could get a drink and to the Bahamas where they could get a drink. No doubt, they smuggled quite a lot of alcohol into the United States using this airline. That kept it going.

Airlines in the United States didn't really get started until 1926. That was after the post office had been carrying the airmail since 1918 through 1926, '27, pioneering all the routes we use today across the United States. They developed a very sophisticated network with a great infrastructure in it. They could fly by night. By 1924, you could get a letter. When we talk about letters, people ship this kind of stuff.

People would send FedEx by now. Today's equivalent of FedEx, it wasn't cheap. You could get a package from New York to San Francisco in 29 hours. That is extremely good even for today. The post office never wanted to stay in that business. They felt correctly that business could do it more efficiently. Starting in 1926, they turned over the delivery of airmail to contract airmail carriers, which are today's airlines. Certainly, the classic airlines. They started flying from 1926 and still are.

Brian Lehrer: That's really interesting. The post office wound up paving the way for passenger flights.

Bob van der Linden: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: How comfortable were those early flights, 19-teens, 1920s, maybe 1930s, for the passengers? I assume there wasn't food service, little packages of pretzels, and things like.

Bob van der Linden: It the teens, it was most uncomfortable. You're sitting in, basically, an open cockpit next to the pilot bouncing all over the place. Not great. In the '20s, they got better airplanes. The classic one would be the Ford Trimotor that sat about 10 to 12 passengers. It looks comfortable, but it wasn't because you're flying. Well, frankly, airline travel didn't get comfortable until the advent of pressurized cockpits. That didn't happen until World War II and afterwards. No matter what airplane you were flying and you were flying about 5,000 feet above the ground, so you're involved in the weather, bouncing all over the skies, air sickness was a common problem.

Brian Lehrer: These were small planes. That's another thing our listeners might have picked up on from your last answer there. You're just talking about 10 people, not a few hundred people flying on a commercial jetliner today.

Bob van der Linden: No, a Trimotor is a good-sized airplane, but it didn't carry 10 people, 12 people. In 1935, the Douglas Sleeper Transport, which became the DC-3, first flew, entered service in '36. It carried 21 passengers, which was huge for that time. That was enough to make a profit. Up until that time, the airlines could not make a profit without the government subsidy through the post office. The subsidy continued until the early 1950s. The post office did this deliberately, gave them a generous subsidy, and then weaned them off of it and encouraged them to expand their routes, carry passengers to offset the cost of airmail cargo to offset the cost. Eventually, it worked and worked great.

Brian Lehrer: When you say it took 29 hours originally to go, to bring something from New York to San Francisco, that's not a 29-hour, non-stop flight. What did that stat refer to?

Bob van der Linden: Well, that was only carrying mail. That was not carrying passengers. The post office did it. That was a total time from New York to San Francisco with many hops across the country following the routes. It was almost 29 hours door-- I should say not door-to-door, but airport-to-airport. Ironically, they left out of Newark, by the way.

Brian Lehrer: Which you could do in those days. Today, not so much. [laughs] Listeners, who has a family story of flying before it was commonplace? Anybody? 212-433-WNYC, in this 100 Years of 100 Things segment, thing number 90, 100 years of civilian air travel, commercial air travel, 212-433-9692. If anybody has a story of you or anybody else earlier in your family, let's say flying before it was commonplace or anything else you want to add even as an employee because, for example, moving on to the 1930s, women took flight for the first time, but not as pilots. I see a woman named Ellen Church, a nurse from Iowa, is credited with the concept of flight attendants. Tell us a little of that story.

Bob van der Linden: Of female flight attendants, yes. There were male flight attendants in Europe in the 1920s. There weren't any flight attendants in the United States until she approached a gentleman by the name of Steve Stimpson, who was the manager of Boeing Air Transport out of San Francisco. She wanted to be a pilot. In those times, they wouldn't allow that. She suggested the next best thing.

She said, "Because air travel was not comfortable and air sickness was a constant problem, wouldn't it be a good idea to put nurses on board?" Stimpson said, "Yes, it's a pretty good idea." Eventually, they did do that. She was the first. She hired the others. They were the first eight. Then that became the job in and of itself. They realized from a marketing standpoint, it was a brilliant idea because, at that time, a lot of people-- Even today, some people, they're uncomfortable flying.

Boeing Air Transport, which was one of the, by the way, four main carriers that would later, in 1931, merge their operations and become United Airlines, realized that if you had a woman on board the airplane as an employee, that would make a lot of people more comfortable. They found out really that a lot of businessmen were not flying because their families wouldn't let them because it was dangerous. They thought if you had a woman on board the airplane, that would convince the spouses that maybe it was safe for the husband to fly, and it worked.

Brian Lehrer: It worked. Here's a pretty old flying-for-the-first-time story, Carol in Rockland County, who I think is going to cite 1947. Hi, Carol, you're on WNYC.

Carol: Hi, yes. In 1947, I was about three and we immigrated. I always think we were maybe the first immigrants to go come by plane and not by boat to the States. We came from London. My parents were refugees from Czechoslovakia. Spent the war years in England in the army and then came here in '47 by air on a DC-3. Took about 19 hours. I always remember sitting at my mother's feet holding a bag for her while she was sick. It's one thing I always look for when I fly is the bag. That's the one thing that has not changed in all the years. There's still a bag in the back of that seat.

Brian Lehrer: Your phone is breaking up, so I got to go. Wow, what a story. Here's one moving on in time to the 1950s. Tony in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tony.

Tony: Hi. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Tony: Good. It's a great show, Brian. A big fan. I was 11 and came home from P.S. 36 in the Bronx after playing the usual stickball game after school. My mother and father sat me down and said, "Anthony, you're 11. You can fly half-fare with Daddy to see his mother in Croatia." I was kind of taken aback. We went to the principal and they gave me six weeks off the sixth grade. The trip embarked from the then-Idlewild Airport on TWA prop planes. We took off. I sat there as a little king because my siblings couldn't go.

We were heading for Europe, right? I sat there absolutely mesmerized by the beautiful stewardesses. They, to me, a little boy of 11, looked like beauty queens. They babied me and took me into the cockpit to visit the pilots and gave me extra food and snacks and candy. It was an amazing trip. It landed about 10 times on the way to Milano, including Nova Scotia, Gander, Dublin, where I drank green milk. I think it was in Switzerland and then to Milano, where my father met his brother for the first time in 33 years.

Brian Lehrer: What was it like very briefly? I know you referred to being on a propeller plane on that flight being so much different from modern aircraft. What did you want to say about that?

Tony: Well, just to see as a little boy, curious kid looking out the window at these propellers, and then they go into a roar. Of course, TWA was like flying in a Rolls-Royce at the time. It was really a combination of experiencing the roar, the miracle of flying, which I've never quite gotten over frankly, and the landings, of course, but it was [sound cut]. That was on display in those days.

Brian Lehrer: Tony, thank you so much. Great story, great storyteller. Here's another one. Manuel in North Bergen, you're on WNYC. Hi, Manuel.

Manuel: Okay. In 1948, I flew with my mother and my sister. I was six years old from Madrid, Spain to Mexico. We immigrated to Mexico at that time. The interesting thing is it was small plane, maybe 30 people. You couldn't talk inside. Nobody could hear you. I didn't care. I was playing with some trains or something in the middle. We went island hopping or had to stop.

I tell you the itinerary because you have to put gas, right? It was from Madrid to Lisbon, Lisbon to the island of Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, from the Azores to Bermuda, from Bermuda to Miami, and to Miami to Mexico. That was the trip. [chuckles] I'll never forget. It was a Mexican national airline. It was called in Spanish, Compañía Mexicana de Aviación, and had a great slogan. It was "La Ruta del Sol," the route of the sun. We follow the sun. We're going west. That's the story.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great story, Manuel. Wow, 1948. How about what he said there, Bob, about the volume? You couldn't hear anybody talk to each other. That a thing?

Bob van der Linden: Well, most piston-engine airplanes, the sound was deafening, especially in airplanes that weren't pressurized. At some point in the '20s and the '30s, they would hand out little packages in cellophane paper of chewing gum to settle your stomach because you were getting airsick and, literally, cotton so you can stick it in your ears. This was so loud. A Ford Trimotor on takeoff was 120 decibels. The same as you sit in the front row of a rock concert. It's deafening.

Later airplanes, probably the kind that the gentleman was on, weren't that loud, but they were still loud. Propellers, when they're spinning, the propeller tips are almost going supersonic. You get four of them. I assume it was a four-engine airplane. That's a lot of noise from the engines because they're piston engines like you have in your automobile making a lot of noise. There's no buffer on them.

The other thing that is often overlooked is that the airplanes, because of these piston engines, vibrated substantially. You just had this constant buzz and vibration the whole flight. It's very tiring. You see the pictures of people all dressed up and looking really nice and comfortable. It's PR. Even when they got into the pressurized propeller-driven airplanes, they were better. Still, over time, the noise and the vibration wears on you.

Brian Lehrer: You remind me when you say "all dressed up," I once interviewed Dr. Spock, not Mr. Spock, Dr. Spock, who wrote those books about child care before he died. He said that one of the ways that he was old-fashioned was that he still thought it was appropriate that when you fly, you should get dressed up. People did that?

Bob van der Linden: People did that all the time up and through airline deregulation for a couple of reasons. It was a big deal to fly. Not everybody could do it. It was a middle-class, upper-middle-class, wealthy thing to do. Yes, people would wear their so-called Sunday best to get on an airplane. No one showed up in shorts and T-shirts and sneakers. It just wasn't done. After that, when deregulation and the ticket prices dropped and anybody could fly and the airlines were just trying to get as many people on board the airplane as possible, that just went by the wayside.

Brian Lehrer: Now, we're doing this in the context of a WNYC Centennial Series celebrating this station's 100th anniversary. We have an archival piece there. I don't have the clip, but it says, "On May 25th, 1934, WNYC took off into the wild blue yonder with a 10-part series of talks on the fundamentals of flying hosted by noted pilot and plane designer Jack B. Stinson from the famous Stinson aircraft family. The 'aviation school of the air' was an effort by station director Christie Bohnsack to keep listeners current with the rapidly advancing science and industry of aviation."

That was 1934 on the station. Let's end because this has gone by so fast. We should really be doing a part two another day. It was in 1970 that the company Boeing released its 747 jet, the world's first so-called jumbo jet. That fundamentally changed the experience of flying for commercial passengers or would that be overstating it?

Bob van der Linden: That's not an overstatement. It's truly a revolutionary aircraft. The only thing revolutionary about its design was that it was so big. It was two and a half times larger than the 707 and the DCH that it replaced. What it did do, because of the size of the airplane, it had unmatched range. Now, it could fly just about anywhere, and it could seat up to 400 passengers.

Normally, the passenger load was 189, something like that. Now, you had an airplane that could carry 400 passengers. Because you could carry that many people despite the size of the airplane, the seat-mile costs dropped dramatically. That's how airlines measure their profitability. The lower the seat mile cost, the amount of money cost to move that seat one mile--

Brian Lehrer: That technology is what transformed it from a luxury item to more of a middle-class item?

Bob van der Linden: Yes, because after that, now, the airlines could drastically cut fares and still make money. While the 747 was the first, it set a whole new market for wide-body aircraft, be it the DC-10s, L-1011s, A300s. Now, all the whole series, the 777s, the A380s, the A350s. For that matter, the technology that was on the 747, the high-bypass turbofan engine, which basically is a very efficient and surprisingly quiet for its size engine. They built smaller versions for smaller aircraft.

Now, smaller airplanes like 737s and now A320s could benefit from the same kind of drastically more efficient engines, which lower the seat-mile costs. Every time you can lower the cost, you can lower the ticket prices, the more people can fly. It's been estimated in the United States that about 80% of the population has flown. That is, in essence, everybody who wants to fly or can fly has flown. It's because of the 747 and those engines and the airline deregulation in 1978 as well.

Brian Lehrer: To my comment about Dr. Spock saying, "If you're going on an airplane, it's appropriate to get dressed up," sarcastic listener writes, "We now dress appropriate to the service we receive." That's going to be the last thought as we leave it there in our 100 Years of 100 Things, segment number 90, 100 years of commercial air travel with Bob van der Linden, commercial aviation curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Thank you so much for this, Bob.

Bob van der Linden: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

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