I don't remember filet mignon, they'd let you up into the cockpit to meet the pilot, and they'd give you these cool wings you could pin on your shirt, and they'd give you a free deck of united playing cards if you asked for them.

You can still go and visit the flight deck if the plane is still boarding at the gate, just ask a flight attendant.

Most pilots leave the flight deck door open until the boarding doors close and they're quite happy to receive visitors.

Sometimes I'll take advantage of that and chat with a them for a few moments. Then I leave them alone because they've got more important things to do than idle chitchat with an engineer.

Flying 50 years ago?

Rows of people (much/most of the plane) smoking, with a flimsy curtain dividing them from the on-smoking section. Getting off with your clothes smelling like an ashtray.

And stewardesses (before they were called "flight attendants") would sometimes ask if it was okay to be seated in a smoking section. I agreed once when I was around 16 years old. Big mistake. I sat next to a dude that chain-smoked the entire flight from San Francisco to St. Louis.

I once ended up in the smoking section by accident. The smoking section was almost always in the back of the plane and I was in the habbit of requesting a seat "as close to the front of the plane as possible." But once time the smoking section was in the front, and I didn't realize this until the no-smoking sign went off and everyone around me lit up. It was a nightmare.

Happily, there were empty seats in the back and I was able to move. Thank God, because it was a trans-Atlantic flight.

That was also the experience of going out to bars and nightclubs in my youth.

People have forgotten just how unpleasant the stink of tobacco smoke was.

> Today, peanuts, if any.

I’ve not been on an airline that served peanuts for at least a decade. Too many allergy concerns.

You’re mixing up flying _in_ an aircraft with _flying_ an aircraft. The author is referring to the latter.

Yeah, a lot of the comments are on the former.

I bet if you paid the inflation adjusted fare you payed then, you could fly first class now and have that food plus a lot of other benefits such as increased safety, quieter flight, higher cabin pressures which will result in a more comfortable flight.

And more flights per day and more routes (debatably a bad thing), so scheduling is a lot easier (for the passenger).

Fuel burn per passenger mile has also gone steadily down. I wonder what’s gotten more efficient: the automobile or the aircraft.

At least very few go out of their way to choose unnecessarily large aircraft for their job.

Economy-class food was a joke 50 years ago.