Flying 1950s Style

Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.

When I wrote about the glamour years at Pan Am (the airline) recently someone pointed me to the great old planes you can see at Motat, Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology. I love this picture from Motat’s files showing the dining set-up in a Solent flying boat.

The aircraft – currently under restoration at Motat and the only surviving Mark IV Solent in the world – represented ‘the pinnacle of luxury flying boat airliners’.

We all aspire to fly business class today but back in the 1950s when the Solent took tourists over the Tasman to Australia and on the island-hopping Coral Route to Tahiti, the whole plane was business class.

Check out the decor in soft lemon and dove grey, the tables spread with white linen, fine china and glassware. Look closely and you can see the TEAL logo on the glasses (TEAL being the forerunner of Air New Zealand – short for Tasman Empire Airways Ltd).

Elaborate meals were apparently cooked on board and it looks like the 45 passengers enjoyed an elegance that's hard to find today.

Mind you, you'd have needed something to pass the time. There was, after all, no in-flight entertainment, so if you forgot to take a good book there was nothing to do but wait to get there.

They weren't quick, cruising at around 400kmh; the Auckland-Sydney flight took five and a half hours. And the planes could go no higher than 17,000 feet which must have meant they had to batter their way through some hefty weather systems. There must, at times, have been a whole lotta rattling of that china going on – and many passengers feeling too queasy to enjoy the food.

When I was a kid I lived at the foot of Upland Road in Remuera, quite a long way from Auckland harbour but still close enough to be able to hear the flying boats on their lumbering take-off runs, those four 2000 horsepower engines roaring like fury as the pilots pushed them to maximum power to lift the plane off the water. I can still hear them now.

* Lindsey is the host of "Let's Talk", Stratos TV – NZ's only current affairs show by women, for women. It airs on Stratos, Sky 89 or Freeview 21, 8pm Sundays, repeated 12.30am Mondays.

By Lindsey Dawson