Reaching New Heights

Air travel has come a long way since the magic and mayhem of its early days, as a new book charting the history of flight emphasises

- Dominic Bliss

Slow, noisy, dusty, bumpy and very, very dangerous. The early days of commercial air travel were anything but comfortable. In 1938, on the fledgling Imperial Airways, it took four long days in a Short Empire flying boat from Southampton to South Africa, with 24 stops en route in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika and Portuguese East Africa.

Passengers had to endure airsickness, technical failures, empty fuel tanks and even crash landings. Fatal accidents occurred with startling regularity. In its 15 years of operation, Imperial Airways suffered 20 of them, including two ditchings in the English Channel, a sinking off the coast of northern Italy, a collision with a radio mast in Flanders and a crash in Belgium following an in-flight fire. The latter is thought to be the first ever case of aeroplane sabotage in the air.

The trials and tribulations of early air travel are the subject of a new illustrated book, Taking to the Air. The author, Lily Ford, pinpoints the catalysts that spurred us upwards: the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic by Captains Alcock and Brown in a Vickers Vimy bomber; the British government’s flogging of excess First World War RAF aircraft, for “£5 a plane at Hendon, cheaper by half than the mechanic’s charge for its certificate of airworthiness”; and the solo transatlantic crossing from New York to Paris by Charles Lindbergh, who “for a few months… became the most famous man in the world”.

“This was enormous in terms of drawing a line under the negative associations with flight that had hung over from the First World War,” Ford says of Lindbergh’s achievement, “and thinking more about the positive, forward-looking embrace of technology.”