FLYING in the old days was great fun, for the lucky few who could afford an air ticket. But in return, they got no hassle over parking and no elaborate security checks when they checked in. The flights were leisurely, devoid of any inflight entertainment or sales pitches.
Flying then was elitist, almost like an exclusive gentleman's club, to which ladies were admitted in certain favourable circumstances.
In many ways, the 1950s was the golden era of this old-style flying, when stepping on to a plane at Dublin or Shannon was a real novelty. Few people could afford to fly; as an example, a return ticket from Dublin to Frankfurt cost £30, which was almost a month's wages for many people. As a result, flying was a preserve of the middle classes and the aristocracy and quite a number of people turned up at Dublin Airport in their own chauffeur-driven cars. People dressed up to fly and some of the women passengers looked as if they had stepped from a fashion photograph.
Some people went one better; the Aly Khan, who owned a stud in Co Kildare, was a glamorous racing car driver who exuded the air of pre-second World War European sophistication. He happened to own his own plane, then virtually unheard of in Ireland.
For the people who did fly, it meant turning up at Dublin airport with mountains of luggage, which created no great problem when they presented their paper tickets at the check-in desk. Security checks and baggage restrictions were unknown and if you arrived at the right time, the concourse was almost deserted. The big drawback was the time it took to fly anywhere.
Until 1964, Aer Lingus was still using that old workhorse of the skies, the DC3. This aircraft was launched way back in 1935 and amazingly, 400 of them are still in service in various offbeat parts of the world. But the DC3's cruising speed was a mere 130 knots, or 240 km/ h, which meant that a flight from Dublin to the old Le Bourget airport near central Paris took a mind and seat-numbing three hours. The arrival of the Viscounts in 1965 was a big advance; Aer Lingus had got into jets when the Boeing 720 came into use in 1960 on the transatlantic service started two years previously.
Apart from flying, Dublin airport itself was still a big novelty in the 1950s. Many people went out there at the weekends, just to breathe in an exotic whiff of aviation; in those days, if you asked someone what they were going to be doing for the weekend, they would quite often reply: "I'm going out to Aer Lingus". Celebrity-watching was a popular pastime at the airport.
A regular double-deck bus service ran from the city centre out to the airport, while there was plenty of car parking at the airport, as well as ample bicycle parks for the people who worked there.
The first departure bar had opened at Dublin airport in 1948, while the first newsagent's shop opened in 1953. The big attraction was the restaurant run by Johnny Oppermann, with Jimmy Flahive the head chef, who went on to become Ireland's first TV chef. Lunch or dinner at the airport was always a great treat and dinners there on a Saturday night were always booked out.
The menu and wine list prices, too, were tempting indeed by today's standards, although dear enough for the time, with a sirloin steak for 10 shillings or a bottle of Chablis for 21/6d. Some of the dishes had flying connotations, such as the Veal Viscount, while Jerry Dempsey, then the head of Aer Lingus, had a steak named in his honour. The Aer Lingus inflight menus, too, were tasty and innovative.
The old Dublin airport terminal was the creation of Desmond FitzGerald, brother of Garret FitzGerald. It had opened for business in 1940 and exactly 50 years later, the then transport minister, a youthful looking Seamus Brennan, unveiled a plaque to this effect at the airport.
It was Garret FitzGerald who, while working for Aer Lingus and engaged in what was for him, the absorbing task of devising timetables, came up with one of the very first marketing ideas for the industry - reduced prices for midweek flights.
Launched in 1949, the Dawnflights and Starflights to London became very popular, but strangely enough, those cheap flights to Paris didn't catch on as much. But for anyone willing to travel at some ungodly hour of the early morning or late evening, the savings were considerable. The first package holidays started at the very end of the 1950s and they began the popularisation of air travel.
When Desmond FitzGerald and his architectural team designed the first Dublin airport terminal, it was meant to cater for 100,000 passengers a year.
By the time it closed for passenger use in 1972, when the new terminal was opened, the throughput was two million.
Technical innovations continued apace, like the new radar system that was inaugurated in 1956. This newspaper said at the time that it would make Dublin airport one of the most modern in the world. Six years later, in 1962, Aer Lingus became the first organisation in the country to use a computer. Behind the scenes, one of the people who worked assiduously in the 1950s and 1960s to develop civil aviation in Ireland was Dr Thekla Beere, the first woman to be secretary of a government department; hers was the old Department of Transport and Power. A spirit of aviation pioneering was very much in the air, long before Ryanair came along.
If comings and goings at Dublin airport were free and easy in the 1950s, it was the same at Shannon airport, where the man behind all its innovations, Dr Brendan O'Regan, was a ferment of new ideas.
In May, 1947, a small kiosk was opened in the terminal to sell Irish souvenirs and transatlantic passengers could avail of the world's first duty-free shop. During the 1950s, the restaurant in the terminal was a model of white linen tablecloth elegance.
After Cork airport opened in October, 1961, it had 10,000 passengers in its first year. These days, more than that number travel on a single day, using Cork's impressive new terminal, opened two years ago.
As the 1960s developed, more and more people developed a taste for flying and what had once been a minority preserve moved much more into the mainstream.
Along the way, flying was democratised and the exclusive tag was ditched. In retrospect, the 1950s and 1960s, when flying was great fun, easily done, without many complications, were a wonderful time in aviation, compared to the rigours and restrictions of modern day flying.