Airhead

Voici le glamour!
There was a nice post from Dick Headley this week showing a before and after aerial photo of Gatwick Airport - it's quite astonishing and I suppose not altogether surprising but even so.... It made me think about how aviation has changed and how 'special' flying once was. My grandmother didn't fly for the first time until she was in her 60's. I went on my first flight when I was 7 when we de-camped to Greece for a year (yes - my mother did a Shirley Valentine - I think I'll save that for another post) and my son went on his first flight aged 9 months!

Gone are the halcyon days of BOAC, Freddie Laker and British Caledonian - I always remember seeing this ad on the tube on the way to school in the late 70's/early 80's

Flying used to be quite glamorous by all accounts


with nice ladies to do nice things for you - and look at the legroom!

One of my distant cousins Edna was a BOAC hostess in the 60's - I remember there always being a photo of her in her uniform waving from a red sports car looking radiant ontop of my granny's telly much to my mother's chagrin who was/is an artist. Now and again she would jet in from somewhere exotic and was treated like royalty when she visited the family - usually in sunny Bournemouth where they had all settled to dye their hair purple, wear dentures and eventually die in the other way. And goodness, we never heard the end of it. Such status! Edna this Edna that.

Anyway...Dick's post made me go on a little trip down memory lane which I thought I would share for a brief moment.

Doors to manual.

And no smoking in the cabin.