Hello and welcome to the final independent travel podcast of the week. It's Friday the 24th of February and I'm Simon Calder and I thoroughly enjoyed getting a reader question which has got me thinking quite a lot. The Golden Age of air travel. I paraphrased very slightly because

what the reader actually says is, why has air travel become so fraught with difficulties? 50 years ago

travelling by plane was exciting and reliable. Now it seems like an obstacle course.

Well, I know that you almost certainly can't remember 50 years ago.

I can.

I was a teenager.

I was growing up in Crawley.

I was very close to Gatwick Airport.

And so therefore, I know something of which I speak about how

things were half a century ago. Gosh, it was exciting the prospect of going by plane to the extent

that, well, it just never happened, bluntly. There was no way that me or my family or most of the people I knew would ever get on a plane in the early 1970s.

I mean, you travelled everywhere by road or rail or indeed by hitchhiking.

And if you wanted to get to Europe, you would be going on the ferry.

The marvellous cross-channel hovercraft were not quite there yet. Because flying was way beyond anybody's normal financial

reach. There was the occasional person who might go off to the Costa Brava on a package holiday

and one of my school friends, but that was

extremely rare. It was simply something that never happened. So, was it exciting? Of course it was.

Is it exciting? Yes, it certainly is. I find airports so compelling. I mean, I used to go to Gatwick mostly because I was

working there in the in the 1970s. I was, well, cleaning out Freddie Lakers planes. I was frisking

people. That was a job, not a hobby. And so I got the excitement of an airport and it's still there. So,

was flying reliable? Well, yes, except when the planes crashed. And it is a terrible, terrible

tragedy that the frequency of plane crashes was so high that it was just kind of normal run-of-the-mill

...