TERRY SMITH tells us about his first commercial flight.
Forty years ago this Christmas, I made my first commercial flight; in fact, it was my first ever trip in a plane. A friend of mine suddenly upped sticks and moved to Los Angeles, so we decided to go and visit him in Tinsel Town over the festive season. In 1980, the Pound was strong against the Dollar but getting there was still expensive, unless you went with a certain Mr Laker.
Since the Mid-1960s Laker Airways was doing their bit to drive down costs of air travel. His company really started to catch the eye of the travelling public when in the late 1970s Freddie Laker bought a fleet of shiny new wide-bodied DC10s, replacing his elderly Boeing 707s, to make is low cost attack on the lucrative Trans-Atlantic route.
This, of course, did not go down too well with the likes of British Airways and especially with the American operators such as Pan-Am. It is little wonder, as the fares charged by what was now being marketed as The Laker Skytrain were half of what the other airlines was charging. In late 1977, Laker started its service between London Gatwick and New York, which was joined by the route to Los Angeles in 1978.
When I was looking for tickets for our flights to Los Angeles there was only one affordable choice – we were going on the Skytrain! It even sounded cool to a young man who had been brought up watching Gerry Anderson TV shows - that name could have come straight out of an episode of Thunderbirds.
I remember that being first time travellers we did not give ourselves enough time to get to our gate and in fact we were still in the bar when we heard our names on the Tannoy as a last call! I had managed to secure a window seat, something I have since always try to do on my flights since then, but I got a little worried as we trundled down the runway. You see I love watching the planes at Gatwick, especially if they are taking off to the west and you are looking through the gap between the perimeter gates. You get a sense of where planes get airborne and at what point on the runway, but we seemed to be way past any reference point before the nose of the DC10 started to lift. What I didn’t know then, was some of the DC10s bought by Freddie on the cheap, were a cancelled order and the type were marginal to make the non-stop trip to California! Fuel was added while a reduced luggage payload put in place, but even so it seemed to take forever to get off the ground. I could imagine the faces of the plane spotters at the end of the runway as the under-carriage almost ripped the hedge from its roots!
The plane, surprisingly, turned north even though I thought we were going west. Oh, the naivety of the first-time airline passenger! While Eastern seaboard flights do head out over the Atlantic flying over the southern tip of Ireland, planes heading to America’s West Coast take a slightly different route. For my first fight, I was treated to a view of the northern polar cap, complete with huge icebergs breaking off heading down into the North Atlantic.
The beauty of the landscape unfolded, as we flew over Canada and then we started our decent over the Rockies and on to our destination 11 hours after leaving Sussex. I had not realised that the futuristic Theme Building was situated close to the terminal buildings but my excitement soon waned as our Skytrain trundled on, way past the main terminal and came to a halt near the edge of the airfield, what was going on?
Remember earlier when I said that the Americans were less than impressed with Laker and his budget airline - well they made that very apparent to his fare paying customers. We ended up at a large inflatable tent and our luggage was just thrown in a huge pile. Immigration was a very nasty looking armed officer who seemed hell-bent on keeping over three hundred passengers waiting for as long as he could. It was not quite the welcome to the US I was expecting. Laker pressed on, adding more routes to the US including Miami, which coupled with Fly-drive, was pushed as a Disney package. However, he over stretched himself and with the global turndown in 1982 he filed for bankruptcy. Laker may have gone but that first flight with the airline was the beginning of a 40-year love affair I have for air-travel, which has taken me to the four corners of the world.
Sir Freddy looks so happy that he got a Revell kit for Christmas! Revell did bring the DC10 Skytrain out as a 1:144th scale model at the time, I bought mine in a store in Los Angeles!
I wonder if I was attracted to spending my money with Laker after seeing this advert.
The Skytrain at home – Laker used Gatwick Airport as its Trans-Atlantic hub. Yours truly nearly missed his flight!
I could not believe my eyes when I saw this out of the window after landing at LAX. I had seen the Theme Building in many science fiction movies. We ended up in a tent!