Inspired by a recent discussion of air travel in the old days, I’m curious how often people flew commercially during their childhood.
For me, not much. Our vacations were road trips.
I took a few flights as a baby, but of course don’t remember them at all. After that there was a one-way flight when I was about eight, and a vacation round trip when I was thirteen. That’s all. This was in the 1970s and 1980s.
Once I was in 3rd grade (age 8+) I flew commercially once or twice a year, to visit grandparents for the summers. Also, my uncle had a plane and my dad had a pilots license so I went up with them in small planes often.
We were a road trip family, and also we didn’t do many trips in general. My dad owned a small business and was loath to leave it attended only by his workers, so major vacations were few and far between.
I had one flight in 8th grade for a school organized trip to Italy. On the ride back, some jerk student took my seat and I wound up in the middle of a widebody jet next to a lady who vomited the whole flight back.
No other flights until I was an adult.
Between the ages of 4 and 16, I flew from coast to coast at least 15 times, maybe more. We lived on the east coast, and my grandfather, who battled cancer for many of those years, lived in the west. Most of that occurred during the 1970s.
I wouldn’t exactly call it fun, but flying was such a better experience back then. The food and service were much better, and we weren’t all crammed in like sardines. I can remember a number of flights where I was able to stretch out across a few empty seats and sleep most of the way. That would never happen today.
As a younger child, we flew to our grandparents each summer for about two weeks. Usually without our parents. A few family trips before I was a teenager. One to California, one to the US Virgin Islands. There could be a trip or two I’m forgetting, but I certainly wasn’t a frequent flyer. My father, on the other hand, was constantly flying when I was a kid. He was at the million mile level at United.
None; first plane ride was age 14.
First time I flew was when I was 18 and the Navy flew me out to Great Lakes. So I never flew as a child.
We rarely went on vacation though. When we still lived in the Bronx we would do a week at Lake George or some time at Millerton, NY. But once we moved to NJ, we did a day trip to Atlantic City before the Casinos. But no vacations.
While I was at Great Lakes, I flew home on a lot of weekends. You could catch a standby flight from Chicago to Newark for a very low price on People’s Airline.
None. My parents considered flying “too expensive” (this was after deregulation, btw). We always took road trips. I didn’t fly for the first time until I was 23, and I bought the ticket myself.
I was born in 1965. My flying experience as a child was very limited.
We went on vacations every summer, which were always driving trips. I didn’t fly on an airliner again until I was 20.
My parents always drove. I can’t remember any childhood plane trips.
I was in my thirties. My boss sent me to Los Angeles for a computer conference. I’ve only flown twice in my life. The other trip was to Chicago.
I don’t mind driving 400 miles. Especially now when airports want people checking in 2 hours early.
I started flying when I was but a babe in arms. By the time I was 13 I had commuted into LAX by helicopter more times then I could count, flown to Texas the same number of times, traveled cross-country (LAX - LGA), flown to Europe and back, and spent many an hour in my father’s Stinson, either as a back-seater “helping” with aerial photography or sitting as co-pilot on the annual trips back to the Kansas homestead.
None, all road trips.
The first time I set foot in a plane was as a 19 year old travelling home on leave.
We moved a lot internationally when I was little, and flying was involved because of the distance, but it was only every couple of years. Once my mom settled in the US with us kids and she and my father divorced, my brother and I would fly to visit him once a year.
When I was a young adult, Mr. Legend and I traveled extensively, but almost always by car. I used to love road trips, and I still would if my joints would cooperate. More than about three hours a day in a car absolutely wipes me out now.
I was a baby the only time I flew on a plane before I was 16. Apparently I cried so much the other passengers had to be stopped from opening a door and tossing me out. Or maybe it was my mother who had to be stopped.
My parents were not big travelers, other than the very occasional road trip vacation. So I didn’t fly until I was 21. I came in to see If I had everybody beat in the ‘oldest to first fly’ category.
Oh well. Looks like you’re the thread ‘winner’ so far, Wildabeast!
Several times, I think (late 1970s-1980s). I know we made three or four trips from the Washington, DC area to Florida, and at least one of them was by plane, possibly all of them. And I’m pretty sure we flew to Boston at least once and probably more than once, and I know my parents took me to California as a toddler, although I don’t remember it. But most of our other leisure travel was either to DE / VA / NC beaches or to my grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania, and those trips would have been by car.
By the time I was a teenager (early '90s) my parents were getting more ambitious with their travel plans, and we probably flew around twice a year or so.
My Dad had a '56 Chevy, which became a '62 Chevy, which became a '68 Chevy*, so he was big on driving trips. Why not? – the back seat was big as a sofa and you had the nifty foot wells where a small kid could nap easily. Also, the trunk was massive and could hold mucho suitcases and a cooler the size of a 55 gallon drum – fried chicken and potato salad on the road, sometimes we’d eat in the back seat.
*Which became a '75 Chevy Impala – man, that was a cabin cruiser.
A friend of mine bought a '77 Impala and owned it many years out of nostalgia, because his parents used to own one. It had an angled-out rear window, like a bay window. He remembers laying on the ‘shelf’ above the back seat looking out the window as they drove, as one did in the free-for-all 70s.
Zero times. My parents were boot-strapping themselves up from the poverty of their childhoods to respectable middle classness. I believe they thought flying was for rich people; in any case, there was no place that far away that we needed that badly to get to that quickly. So my first flight was when I was 18 and going off to college. I flew a redeye on standby, because I had to pay for it myself from my summer job money. It was kind of thrilling, even though all I did was sleep.