From Shannon, in Ireland, to Gander, in Newfoundland, is a distance of 1,975 miles. The B.O.A.C. Constellation aircraft in which I travelled accomplished the journey in almost exactly ten hours. The return flight in a sister vessel took seven hours. The difference is a measure of the prevailing wind, which over the Atlantic blows from the west.
Miles lose their meaning on a flight of this magnitude, but if you are interested, it is easy to reckon your position at any given moment. Call the distance, in round figures, 2,000 miles; your speed on the outward journey is, therefore, 200 miles an hour. After an hour out you are 200 miles from Shannon; after two hours, 400; after five hours, 1,000, or half-way. Your estimate can be checked on the occasions when the steward produces a map displaying the route, marked with little x’s where it crosses the curves of longitude, and the time at which each curve is crossed.
The procedure is somewhat reminiscent of the mixed enthusiasm and apathy with which passengers on the great trans-Atlantic liners of pre-war days – Heaven forgive me, I had almost said the old-fashioned ocean liners – greeted the report of progress which the purser pinned up at mid-day on the saloon noticeboard.
B.O.A.C. is peculiar among the air companies in its fidelity to the steward. Other lines have invented, adopted, and publicised the "air hostess." "Our view," said a B.O.A.C. official to me at Rineanna [Shannon], "is that there is nothing to beat the old-fashioned steward," and this doctrine was reiterated in even more emphatic terms at a dinner which the Corporation [BOAC] very courteously gave our party of journalists at the Biltmore in New York. Nevertheless, the Corporation retains an open mind. If experience indicates that passengers prefer the lacquered charm of the air hostess to the undemonstrative efficiency of the male steward, they will have what they wish. For myself, I found the stewards supremely good, and more sensitive in their appreciation of the nuances of a passenger's thirst than any maiden in uniform, however fair to outward view, might reasonably be expected to be. On the other hand, contemplating the mothers and children who constituted a fair proportion of our ship's personnel, I could not help wondering whether the steward would be as handy as the air hostess in regard to the changing of a napkin or the administration of a feeding-bottle.
Neither, indeed, is a contingency that may be expected to arise. Baby is only likely to leave mother's protective arms if mother becomes sick; and I could ascertain no reason why such a misadventure should befall mother. This business of air sickness and its principle cause, "bumps," seems to me to have been grossly exaggerated. Anybody who has travelled in an average omnibus on an "unclassified" road has suffered far more severely from bumps than I or any of my companions suffered on this trans-Atlantic flight. The only occasion on which they were more than mildly noticeable occurred when we were climbing out of Gander on the route to New York, but even then they were at no time severe enough to throw me off my feet into somebody's lap; and the worst of them was not nearly so violent as the jerks that will unbalance you every few seconds if you have the bad fortune to be standing in a bus in Westmoreland street at a rush hour.
The problem of stewards versus stewardesses is, in essentials, a problem in psychology. There are people who derive courage – not that courage is necessary for air travel to-day – from the sight of a solid male steward. Against that who could feel – or, if he felt it, dare to exhibit – any symptom of uneasiness in the presence of an immaculately groomed, dainty young thing, with hair and complexion as perfect as if she had just stepped out of her boudoir. At least one of the American companies, I perceived at Rineanna, garbs its hostesses with conspicuously high-heeled shoes. The effect is subtle. What possible danger (says your sub-conscious) can there be in the longest flight, when a girl can make it in footwear of drawing-room delicacy? Cunning in the ways of publicity, indeed, are the Americans.
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Selected by Joe Joyce; email fromthearchives@irishtimes.com
