It’s Friday, Oppo, so let’s gas up and fly into the weekend.
In the mid-1930s, America Airlines convinced Donald Douglas to develop the DC-3 and DC-3 Douglas Sleeper Transport (DST). These aircraft, which American dubbed Flagships, soon connected the entire country east to west. The promotional film Flagships of the Air was made to drum up business by extolling the benefits of time savings and comfort that modern aircraft provided: passenger cabins with cooled or heated air pumped in before takeoff, forty pounds of luggage per passenger, and overnight flights from New York to Los Angeles via Dallas, and dazzling views of the country from an unpressurized altitude of about 10,000 feet. But the film wasn’t just about selling tickets. It also educated Americans on how commercial aviation made the country smaller at a time when airline travel was still relatively new but was also starting to, well, take off. The film is pretty corny, and sometimes cringingly sexist by today’s standards, but it nevertheless provides an interesting look at the early days of commercial aviation.