Super Colossal Transatlantic Travel, Circa 1949

Digital Nomad Andrew Evans sends along this interview with his 97-year-old grandfather who vividly recalls his first transatlantic flight in 1949.

Not to boast, but in the last year I’ve crossed the Atlantic twelve times. In fact, I’ve done the 8-hour trip so many times, it’s become rather routine: I doze during taxi and take-off, read until dinner, watch some movie I didn’t want to pay for at home, then fall into fitful sleep before Greenland. Hopefully, I wake up somewhere over the English Channel. It’s all so easy and yet still so amazing to me how every night, thousands of people pile into big metal pipes and wake up on the other side of the ocean.

In 1492, it took Christopher Columbus exactly 70 days to cross the same ocean and there was no SkyMall to pass the time. In 1776, tall sailing ships crossed the Atlantic in about 54 days and by the turn of the last century, steam-powered ocean liners crossed in about a week.

In 1912, just two months after the Titanic slipped beneath the icy North Atlantic waves, my grandfather Robert Brown Evans was born. Airplanes were just getting off the ground but by the time my grandfather was a teenager, Charles Lindbergh had made his famous flight from New York to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours.

As a paperboy supporting his widowed mother and three sisters, my grandfather never expected to travel outside his native Salt Lake City. But in 1929, when he was just 17 years old, he won an award for signing up the most new subscribers. His prize was a train trip to Seattle and a quick spin in a World War I biplane: “There was a single passenger seat in the front and a seat in back for the pilot, so they squeezed me and another boy up front. Right before we took off, the mechanics came and switched the propeller on the front of the plane, which of course, made me feel uneasy.”

Today, my grandfather is 97 years old with a lifetime of international travel experience connected to his work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s foreign service.  Curious as to how things have changed, I asked him about the first time he crossed the Atlantic exactly sixty years ago. He remembered quite clearly:

“It was the spring of 1949. We took the train to New York and then took off around five o’clock in the evening. We flew for a while and then landed in Gander, Newfoundland. It was dark and the middle of the night—we all got off but there was really nothing to do except buy trinkets while the plane reloaded with gas. Then we got back on and kept flying. After a long time, I saw dawn breaking way to the east. I was very excited and sat right by a window—the first thing I saw was a little dirt road, then we landed outside a great big city—Glasgow, Scotland. There we got off to eat and were met by a whole bunch of waiters dressed up in white tie and dinner jackets. I thought, ‘Good land! For breakfast that’s ridiculous!’ but it was to show that if you traveled by aeroplane you were some kind of super colossal person. We took off again—the planes flew lower back then and I remember looking down and seeing a two-story bus driving down the wrong side of the street. That’s when I knew I was somewhere else.”

My grandfather finally landed in London sometime in the early afternoon. Thanks to the awesome Internet, I found the original schedule for his British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC)—the precursor to today’s British Airways. BO Flight 504 departed New York at 5:30 pm, stopped in Gander for an hour at 10:30 pm, landed in Scotland at 10:45 the next morning and arrived in London at 3:00 in the afternoon. That’s a sixteen and a half-hour journey—more than double the time it takes today.

What’s more, the round trip ticket was listed as costing $630 at the time, equivalent to $5,687 today if you adjust for inflation. Last year I bought a ticket from New York to London for exactly $500, which if you adjust backwards, was equal to $55 in 1949. Roughly speaking, that means flying across the Atlantic has become ten times cheaper. Today’s transatlantic flights don’t stop in Scotland for a formal breakfast or offer such close-up views, but if you think about it long enough, the jump from one side to the other is anything but routine.

For my grandfather in 1949, the transatlantic journey was an incredible thrill. “I was excited like nobody ever heard because I was finally getting over to Europe! I already knew about all these places from reading National Geographic magazine, so I was very excited to actually get to see them.” Fortunately, I inherited my grandfather’s same excitement in exactly the same way, which is precisely why, in the last year, I’ve crossed the Atlantic twelve times.