av Erik Johansson » 21 maj 2009, 12:47
Thanks Lars for guiding us to that magnificent selection of photos. I came into aviation a small bit too late to enjoy those days. Still, I get pleasure from watching the pictures and reading about the really good old days in aviation or really old good days. Watching the photos of the Sandringham flying boats brought my thoughts back to Alexander Frater’s book ‘Beyond the blue horizon’. I suppose some of the photos I just watched could have been taken by any of the passengers flying with Imperial Airways to Australia.
We laugh about RyanAir’s proposal to charge extra for overweight passengers. Let me quote this from the book:
‘Passengers for Australia, attended by a uniformed page boy, were brought here (Croydon Airport) in a charabanc from the airline’s new terminal at Victoria. There, everybody had been asked to mount the scales (the 100 kilo personal allowance included a customer’s own body weight) before receiving a rout map, a set of headed in-flight notepapers and envelopes, and a comprehensively illustrated introductory booklet to air travel.’